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Rmk * [~| 7 


COPYRIGHT DEPOSIT 




No. 744 


Eleanor Holmes 


60 Cents 


Entered at the Post-Office at New York, as Second-class Mail Matter. Issued Monthly. Subscription Price per Year, 12 Nos., $7.50. 


THE PRICE OF A PEARL 


2L Kernel 


BY 

ELEANOR HOLMES 



NEW YOKE 

HARPER & BROTHERS, PUBLISHERS 

March, 1894 


HARPER’S FRANKLIN SQUARE LIBRARY. -LATEST ISSUES. 


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144. The Price of a Pearl. A Novel. By Eleanor 

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743. Tempe. A Novel. By Constance Cotterell — 50 
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741. The Transgression of Terence Clancy. A Novel. 

By Harold Valliugs 50 

740. The Burden of Isabel. A Novel. ByJ. Maclaren 

Cobban 60 

739. Dr. Mirabel’s Theory. A Psychological Study. 

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738. Half a Hero. A Novel. By Anthony Hope. ... 50 
737. The Nameless City. A Novel. By Stephen Grail 50 
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735. Debit and Credit. A Novel. By Gustav Frey- 

tag. Translated by L. C. C 60 

734. A Wasted Crime. A Novel. By D. C. Murray.. 50 
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gough 50 

732. An Imperative Duty. A Novel. By W. D. Howells 50 
731. A Girl with a Temper. A Novel. By H. B. 

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730. The Veiled Hand. A Novel. By FrederickWicks 50 

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A Novel and its Sequel 40 

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\ 


























































THE PRICE OF A PEARL 




B 1Rov>e( 



ELEANOR HOLMES 


“ In love the values are fictitious, and imagination fixes the price ” 



NEW YORK 

HARPER & BROTHERS PUBLISHERS 
1894 


A 




















* 




/ 

































































t 



TO 

F. E. E. 

“ Who never didst my heart or life misknow 
Nor either’s fault too keenly apprehend” 



CONTENTS 


part IT 

0UAP - PAQR 

I. ON A MAY MORN 1 

II. THINKING ALOUD 

III. WITHOUT A NAMK 

IY. QUESTION AND ANSWER ‘22 

Y. CALLED TO ACCOUNT 

YI. NEXT MORNING 

VII. THE HEAD OF THE HOUSE 48 

VIII. UNDER FOUR EYES 58 

IX. A YOUNGER SON 

X. THE SECOND STRING .... 75 

XI. UNDINE OR LORELEI? 83 

XII. A SIMPLE FRACTURE 89 

part HIT 

I. PIN PRICKS 

II. IS THERE NOT A CAUSE? 104 

III. THE SKELETON IN THE CUPBOARD HI 

IV. SOME ONE ELSE 121 

v. uncle Christopher’s narrative 129 

YI. THE druid’s STONE 140 

VII. ANDROMACHE 160 

VIII. FOR THE SECOND TIME OF ASKING 160 

IX. ON THE BEST AUTHORITY 166 

X. NO PLACE FOR REPENTANCE 173 

XI. OYER THE TEA-CUPS 180 

XII. SET FREE 187 

XIII. FOR THE SAKE OF A WOMAN 193 

xiv. missing! 203 


VI 


CONTENTS 


part iririr 

OHAP. PAGE 

I. THE USES OF ADVERSITY 211 

II. THE UNKIND WORLD 217 

III. HISTORY, PAST AND PRESENT 226 

IV. COMPANY OR TRUMPERY? 235 

V. TAKEN FOR GRANTED 243 

VI. A VALEDICTION 254 

VII. REMEMBER OR FORGET? 262 

VIII. THE OTHER WOMAN 272 

IX. SLIPPERY GROUND 279 

X. KISMET ! 286 

part IT ID 

I. MUTUAL ENLIGHTENMENT 293 

II. CHARACTER OR DESTINY? 304 

III. SOME DAY 310 

IV. A COLD HAND 317 

V. THE NIGHT BEFORE 326 

VI. THE DAY AFTER 336 

VII. THE SAME DAY 344 

VIII. REPRIEVED 352 

IX. ANOTHER SHADOW 359 

X. GIVEN BACK 366 

XI. A DAY OF JUDGMENT 376 

XII. FIAT VOLUNTAS 384 


THE PRICE OF A PEARL 


part H 


CHAPTER I 
ON A MAY MORN 


“Pale as a pearl she is; paleness that gives 
A woman grace, yet not too pale a hue.” 

The laburnums were in full flower in a certain shabby, ill-kept 
little plot of ground known to the inhabitants of Fingall as St. 
Bridget’s Place. 

Among its choked-up borders patches of white narcissi, striped 
tulips, and other garden flowers struggled feebly for existence with 
invading and overpowering weeds, and the rank, unmown grass was 
plentifully besprinkled with daisies, whereof various groups of chil- 
dren, big and little, were busily engaged in weaving chains, their 
respective nurses and guardians looking on meanwhile from the 
neighboring benches. It was an exquisite spring day, one of those 
that obliterate all memory of winter, although reviving in full force 
the many vague, nameless longings that winter puts to sleep. 

A day to be glad in, and rejoice in the bare fact of existence ; a 
day to be sad in, because existence is, after all, so hemmed in by 
stern necessity for most of us. The thrushes carolling in the labur- 
nums were giving delicious utterance to the first mood, the young 
lady singing in one of the neighboring houses with a pathetic note 
in her voice that made people stop to listen to it was equally suc- 
cessful in expressing the second. 

She had a face that matched her voice in the sense that none 
could fail to notice it. Yet somehow no one ever dreamed of call- 
ing Pearl Merryweather either pretty or handsome. 

1 


2 


THE PRICE OF A PEARL 


She was made up apparently, of contrasts, not to say violent con- 
tradictions. She had fair hair, and very dark eyebrows and eye- 
lashes. The eyes themselves startled you by being’ almost as green 
as sea-water; and the complexion was as nearly colorless as might 
consist with the possession of superb health and unflagging energy. 

She was not tall, but beside her it sometimes happened that a tall 
woman looked insignificant and ungraceful. She was not haughty, 
but most people began by being a little afraid of her ; and, finally, 
she was still quite young, yet gave a very curious impression to 
strangers of having had an immense and varied experience. 

The best summing-up of her rather unique personality was, in 
fact, to be found in the twofold nickname bestowed on her by the 
college undergraduates, of whom one set had christened her “the 
Baby,” while another faction more respectable dubbed her “ the 
Queen.” Such was Pearl Merrywcather on this bright May morn- 
ing, as she sat at the grand piano in her aunt’s drawing-room and 
let forth her rich trained voice in a plaintive Irish melody. 

The windows had been thrown open to the balmy air and glowing 
sunshine ; and outside one or two of the passers-by stopped to listen 
to the song, every word of which was plainly audible from where 
they stood, half-hidden by the wistaria that framed the sashes. 

“From the red rose to the apple blossom, 

From the apple blossom to the blue sky, 

Looking up still in the spring-tide, 

When none else is by, 

For a love born on a May morn 
Long ago, love, I sigh. 

“From the blue sky to the apple blossom, 

And the roses in row, 

Looking down still in the spring-tide, 

Through my garden I go, 

For a love lost in a spring frost, 

Singing Heigho, heigho !” 

“ It is rather sad, I think, for a spring song,” Pearl’s aunt observed, 
with a smile. 

She was aware that the girl was quite unconscious of having sung 
for any one but herself, for which reason she had put her whole 
heart into the song, and made it an exact transcript of her own 
somewhat melancholy mood. 

“ I don’t know why a spring song should be so very joyous. After 
all, everything has all got to be begun over again.” 


ON A MAY MORN 


3 


She swung herself round as she spoke, and faced her aunt, whose 
smile was half sad and half merry, as she asked, quietly : 

“ What is it that has to be begun again in your case, Pearl ?” 

Mrs. Fursden called herself an old woman, and looked it, too, though 
she wanted some years yet of the threescore and ten that are sup- 
posed to be the normal period of human life. 

She was large even to unwieldiness, but it was wonderful what 
grace remained still in the poise of her small, well-shaped head, and 
the slope of her drooping shoulders. And her beautiful soft-brown 
eyes had nothing of age in them, notwithstanding her snowy hair 
and countless wrinkles. The soul that looked out through these 
agate windows was young still, if also wise, and wholly unimbittered 
by the sorrows that had engraven themselves on her sweet face and 
blanched her hair. 

“ What has to be begun over again ?” she persisted, as she met 
Pearl’s laughing eyes, in which, nevertheless, there was another ex- 
pression that was scarcely a merry one. 

“ Oh, the old round of everything — all the things that one had 
hoped were safely asleep, all the kicks against the pricks that one 
had left off in winter, all the unreasonable wishes that will not be 
starved out — oh, Aunt Emily, you know quite well what I mean, 
and that is what the song means too. That is why I like it. I’m 
sick of stories that end well, they’re never true to life.” 

“ You had an audience,” said Mrs. Fursden, wisely turning the 
girl’s petulant thoughts into a less morbid channel. 

She knew how easy it is to get up a case against life, merely by a 
little subjective reflection on its darker side. She knew also that in 
this particular instance the case was not altogether empty. 

“An audience, had I? Do you mean somebody outside?” 

“ Two or three people stopped, but one stayed. A young man too. 
He must have been romantically inclined.” 

“What was he like?” and Pearl peeped out rather coquettishly 
from behind the muslin curtains. 

“ Oh, he is gone ! He made off when he saw that he was discovered.” 

“A gentleman ?” 

“Decidedly; quite young too, and very good-looking.” 

“It sounds interesting,” Pearl said, laughingly; “he evidently 
has good taste. Well, Aunt Emily, will you sing it for me now? 
I want a lesson in it.” 

Mrs. Fursden relinquished her easy-chair and took Pearl’s place at 
the piano. 


4 


THE PRICE OF A PEARL 


The girl listened to her with rapt attention. The voice was a 
wreck, but the manner was perfect. In her day this woman must 
have been a magnificent singer. She was, besides, an artist to her 
finger-tips. Pearl heaved a deep sigh when the song was ended. 

“Yes,” she said, moodily, “that is how it ought to be, but I 
could never make it sound like that, even though the young man 
outside did stop to listen to me. What is it that makes the differ- 
ence? I have the voice, and you have taught me to use it properly, 
and I love singing better than anything in the world, and yet I don’t 
believe I am an artist.” 

“You might be,” Mrs. Fursden hastened to assure her, kindly. 

“But I am not, and I want to know why, Aunt Emily.” 

“ Well, for one thing, you are much too subjective, if you want to 
know.” 

Pearl knitted her forehead, and looked a little perplexed, as she 
inquired : 

“ Do I want expression ?” 

“No, but your expression is too conscious and too personal. 
There is always too much of you, you yourself, in your singing. 
The song is swamped in the singer, and so you stop short at being 
what you want to be — a real artist.” 

“ But I still don’t quite understand,” Pearl persisted, though not 
with any perversity. “Am I not to feel what I sing? I don’t think 
I can help that.” 

“Certainly, you foolish child,” her aunt said, laughingly, “but 
what I want is that you should not feel yourself feeling. To people 
who know you as I do, your singing always seems to say, “ Listen 
to me, Pearl Merry weather.” 

“ And to the people who don’t know me?” 

“To the people who don’t know, it often speaks in an unknown 
tongue. You do not give expression to their feelings, and they 
don’t always understand yours.” 

“ How about the young man just now?” 

“Ah, exactly; you didn’t know he was there, or you would not 
have sung nearly so well as you did.” 

“Well, I may as well make up my mind that I shall never be an 
artist;” and Pearl looked vexed as she went over to the piano, and 
began to collect her scattered music. 

Like a great many other people, she was more willing to find 
fault with herself than to be told exactly what was amiss with her. 

Mrs. Fursden looked vexed also, for her criticism had not been 


ON A MAY MORN 


gratuitous. Only for a moment, however, and then her sweet face 
was unruffled as before. 

u Is Stephen coming for you, my child ?” 

“ No, Aunt Cecilia will send the carriage. Stephen is hunting up 
another man for to-night.” 

“ Another man ?” repeated her aunt. 

“Yes, it sounds absurd, doesn’t it? But you see, Aunt Cecilia is 
giving one of her big dinners this evening, and at the last moment 
Lord Bertie Meredith has failed her, so Stephen has gone to hunt up 
a substitute.” 

“And why not Stephen himself?” 

“ He was engaged ; at least, he says so. I don’t know that Aunt 
Cecilia believed him, but you would have laughed if you had heard 
her directions about the stop-gap. He was not to belong to the col- 
lege set; he was not to be a doctor; he was not to be a clergyman; 
he was on no account to be an author. There was really nothing 
left that he could be, except a soldier, or a sailor, or what Stephen 
used to call a 1 gentleman at large.’ ” 

“ Which is what Master Stephen himself would dearly like to bo, 
I suspect,” observed Mrs. Fursden, demurely. 

Pearl laughed, and then colored a little, and finally said, with 
some self-consciousness both of tone and manner : 

“ You knew, didn’t you, that Mr. Lewis has offered to give him a 
berth ?” 

“ So I heard. It is a capital opening for Stephen.” 

There was a little pause after this, during which Pearl kept her 
face carefully lowered over her music-books. Mrs. Fursden broke 
the silence by asking, rather meaningly : 

“ Is that all, Pearl ?” 

“ All what, Aunt Emily ?” 

“ All I am to hear to-day.” 

“It is all that there is to tell.” 

“ It is not all I have heard from others.” 

“ People talk such nonsense,” Miss Pearl remarked, rather loftily. 

“ But not generally without some little foundation,” replied her 
aunt. “ However, dear child, I have not listened to any nonsense, as 
you call it, because I have said to myself that Pearl would certainly 
tell me before any one if there were really anything to tell.” 

This appeal had the desired effect, for the girl came over and 
knelt down caressingly beside the old lady. 

- “ I would indeed tell you, Aunt Emily, first of all, if I knew myself.” 


6 


THE PRICE OF A PEARL 


“Do you mean then, my child, that he lias said nothing?” 

“No, it is not that, though indeed he has not said anything yet, 
but — ” 

“You think he will, if you let him?” 

Pearl waited a moment, and then rushed at her answer, like an in- 
experienced rider at a fence. 

“ It is the old, old story, Aunt Emily, and you will despise me, I 
dare say, but ... I can’t make up my mind.” 

“ I don’t despise you at all, you little goose. A great many 
women find themselves in that predicament at some time or other 
in their lives.” 

“ But I don’t believe I shall ever be in any other. Sometimes I 
would give the whole world that the thing could be settled for me 
as it is in France.” 

“ I doubt if that would much mend matters, for you, at least. 
What is he like, this Mr. Lewis? How much do you think you 
fancy him ?” 

“ I don’t know. I do like him, I think. He is very different 
from most men I meet.” 

“How old?” 

“Oh, I suppose people would call him middle-aged. His hair is . 
rather gray, but he doesn’t seem to want to be considered young.” 

“And what does he consist of? Are there any relatives — objec- 
tionable or otherwise?” 

“None, I believe, except an old uncle, who is fabulously rich and 
very eccentric, and insists on having deaf-and-dumb maids to wait 
on him.” 

“ He must be rather original, I should think. Well, go on, Pearl ; 
tell me more about this new admirer.” 

“ There is no more, except that he is a great banker, as you know, 
and that he is going to make Stephen’s fortune, or at least help him 
to make it himself, and — ” 

“And that he is fond of my Pearl?” said Mrs. Fursden, putting 
her hand under the girl’s shapely chin, and forcing her to meet 
her searching eyes. 

Pearl’s only answer was a- heavy sigh. 

“What does he think, and hope, and believe, Pearl? Have you 
the least idea? That is more to the purpose than the bank, I 
think.” 

“ He is very good, and goes in a great deal for charitable work in 
London. So I have heard, at least, from people who know him.” 


ON A MAY MORN 


7 


“ And what does your godmother say?” 

“ She says if I don’t take care I shall pick up a crooked stick.” 

“Then she would approve of this match for you?” 

“Oh yes; she has not said so exactly, but of course one can’t 
help knowing.” 

“A good man,” repeated Mrs. Fnrsden, in a musing tone, “and 
well off, and next to no relations. It sounds perfect. Now, tell me 
why you should hesitate, my dear child.” 

There was rather a froward flicker in Pearl’s curious green eyes 
as she answered : 

“ Well, perhaps because he is so good. I can’t think of any other 
reason.” 

“You would not care to marry a man who was not good?” 

“ No, of course not, but I always feel that Mr. Lewis thinks me 
better than I am.” 

“ So much the better if you try to be what he thinks you.” 

For the third time this morning Pearl heaved a profound sigh. 

“I wish I knew exactly what to do,” she said, presently. “Do 
advise me, Aunt Emily.” 

“ Will you follow my advice if I give it to you ?” 

“ If I can.” 

“ From my point of view, it is a case of must rather than can.” 

“ What is your point of view ?” 

“ If you don’t mean to say ‘ Yes,’ don’t let him put the question, 
and leave him alone in future.” 

“Aunt Emily, you are quite mistaken if you think that I have 
tried to make him fond of me.” 

“I don’t think so, but from what you tell me I am sure that he 
cares for yon very much, and I am afraid that if you go on making 
yourself so charming to him he will find it rather hard to leave off 
caring when the time comes.” 

“ I don’t know that I quite want him to leave off,” Pearl said, re- 
flectively. 

“Ah, there it is!” exclaimed her aunt, with a little excusable dis- 
pleasure. “It is women like you who make men cynical. Well, 
you asked for my advice and I have given it. I don’t think we need 
sav anything more about the matter;” and the old lady got up 
rather abruptly, and walked over to the open window. 

Pearl followed her after a moment’s hesitation, and said, beseech- 
ingly : 

“Don’t be angry, Aunt Emily; you know I was only joking.” 


8 


THE PRICE OF A PEARL 


“ I am not angry, child, but it is no joke to trifle with a man’s af- 
fections. If you ever do, as sure as fate you will be paid back in 
kind. Be wise, Pearl.” 

“Honestly, Aunt Emily, I do want to be wise, but I know quite 
well that he won’t leave without speaking.” 

“Poor fellow ! He deserves a better fate.” 

“But if I said ‘Yes’?” hazarded Pearl, a little timidly. 

Mrs. Fursden looked at her with keenly penetrating eyes up and 
down, through and through, till Pearl warded them off at last with 
a pretty playful gesture, and turned away her face. 

“ It would be a worse fate for him than the other,” the old lady 
said, decisively, after having made this careful scrutiny. 

And Pearl was wise enough not to attempt to dispute this judg- 
ment. 


CHAPTER II 


THINKING ALOUD 

“ ’Tis greatly wise to talk with our past hours, 

And ask them what report they bore to heaven.” 

Pearl Merryweather was the daughter of the Archdeacon of 
Fingall. Her mother had died before the little girl was of an age 
to realize even dimly the irreparable nature of such a loss to any 
child, to one in her own position most of all. 

The tenderest father cannot make up for it, and the archdeacon 
was scarcely to be called a tender father, although often erring on 
the side of undue indulgence to both his children. 

He was an extremely busy man ; to quote his own expression with 
regard to the requirements of his position as archdeacon, he was the 
eye and heart of the bishop, and did everything short of those act- 
ually episcopal functions which cannot possibly be delegated to any 
substitute. 

The city may have been the better, perhaps, for his untiring zeal 
and activity, but it is certain that his own children were not so. 
Still, it had not yet dawned on him that the relations between him- 
self and them were scarcely desirable if not so unusual iu these days 
as they ought to be. 

He was aware, indeed, that his son Stephen was idle and extrava- 
gant even beyond the generality of youthful sinners. It did not 
occur to him that he had never in his whole life made the smallest 
attempt to win the boy’s confidence or to educate his will. Stephen 
had been sent to Eton, and afterwards to Christchurch, where he had 
narrowly escaped expulsion for some college pranks that savored 
less, perhaps, of actual vice than of vacancy of mind. 

He had also contracted within those reverend walls more than one 
undesirable intimacy with men above him in social position ; and 
was, in consequence, at the present moment, at least knee-deep in 
that deceitful quagmire to which we give the name of debt. Never- 
theless, the archdeacon flattered himself that he had done the right 
thing by Stephen. 


10 


THE PRICE OF A PEARL 


With his daughter’s education he had scarcely occupied himself 
at all. That trouble had been taken off his hands by her godmother, 
Lady Dalrymple, a first cousin of Mrs. Merryweather, and owner of 
the largest house in the largest square in the United Kingdom. 

For it was a fact on which the inhabitants of Fingall piqued them- 
selves not a little, that Monmouth Square might with ease have en- 
closed all those of Mayfair and Belgravia put together, still leaving 
a wide margin over to be planted as a boulevard. 

Walking beneath these shady beech-trees with a kindred spirit or 
a budding lover, one might have fancied one’s self miles away from 
the great busy city, save for the distant hum of traffic in the crowded 
streets beyond. 

In this square Pearl had skipped and played merrily as a little 
child, had walked demurely and discontentedly as a growing girl; 
and here, also, she strolled about later as a dangerously dreamy 
maiden, looking out on life with restless, unsatisfied eyes, which, 
alas! possessed also a fatal power of distracting and distorting the 
outlook of others. 

But whether as child, or growing girl, or grown woman, she was 
ever a stranger to her father, who knew no more of her inner life, or 
of the motive power that guided it, than if she had been a Malay or 
a Hottentot. 

To be sure, it had happened several times in the past four or five 
years that he had held unwilling interviews in his study with ner- 
vous, awkward, or excited gentlemen of different ages and degrees, 
but each more or less passionately bent on the same object — that of 
marrying the archdeacon’s daughter. In nearly all cases the arch- 
deacon’s answer was the same. His daughter was free to choose for 
herself. It did not enter into his preoccupied brain that this, to be- 
gin with, was a most misleading statement, inasmuch as Lady Dai- 
ry mple’s influence over her goddaughter was quite notorious. 

And so the suitors were severally dismissed with Dr. Merry- 
weather’s blessing to receive their answer from Pearl’s own lips. But 
why she in her turn dismissed them, sometimes with scant courtesy, 
and what she had done in the first instance to induce them to risk 
such treatment, the archdeacon was far too busy to inquire; and 
Pearl went her own way accordingly, not always to the satisfaction 
of those most intimately concerned with it. 

To the society in which she moved she was an object of ill- 
natured curiosity, only slightly modified by a sincere yet grudging 
admiration. 


THINKING ALOUD 


11 


There were many prettier girls in Fingall than the archdeacon’s 
daughter, but, apparently without either effort or inclination on her 
part, she eclipsed them all. 

None the less was it necessary that she should be treated with 
marked consideration. 

Lady Dalrymple was the acknowledged ruler of Fingall society: 
in her house were to be met the' best partis of all the various sets 
and cliques into which that society was split up. Here alone did 
cavalry officers, and ecclesiastical dignitaries, and university dons, 
and leading physicians, and rich manufacturers, and successful en- 
gineers, meet on common ground and treat each other with common 
civility, as all good Christians should. 

Therefore it was above all things of importance to keep in with 
Lady Dalrymple, and on no account to offend’ her, and report said 
that Miss Merryvveather was to be Lady Dalrymple’s heiress. 

Certainly Lady Dalrymple had never said so herself, but neither 
had she ever cared to contradict what other people were obliging 
enough to say for her. 

And she had superintended the girl’s education from first to last, 
had presented her at court, had taken her abroad, and finally 
launched her in society under her own auspices; treating her in all 
respects as a much-indulged daughter, giving no party herself, large 
or small, at which Pearl was not prominently brought forward, and 
sparing neither pains nor expense in setting off her somewhat un- 
usual appearance. 

What could she intend therefore by her goddaughter if not to 
bequeath to her a considerable slice, at least, of that colossal fortune 
of which the late Sir Roger Dalrymple, mill-owner and iron-master, 
had left her sole mistress? Curiously enough, no one ever thought 
of assigning any portion of it to Pearl’s brother. The youth was a 
general favorite in Fingall society, but his market value was com- 
paratively nowhere. It had got about somehow that Lady Dalrym- 
ple had paid her young kinsman’s debts once after he left Oxford, 
but that she had drawn the line at doing so a second time. 

Certain it was that there was no love lost between the imperious 
dame and the easy-going, pleasant-mannered young scapegrace who 
had the misfortune to be Pearl’s brother; and it was generally re- 
ported in Fingall that Master Stephen would never see a penny of 
his wealthy relative’s money. 

Accordingly, those astute matrons who kept lists of eligible 
suitors for their grown-up daughters were obliged, however reluc- 


12 


THE PRICE OF A PEARL 


tantly, to omit his name therefrom ; and young Merry weather’s social 
status in the city was that of a detrimental only. His father had 
private means indeed, but a young man with expensive habits and 
gambling propensities is apt to exhaust the family exchequer. So 
reasoned the good people of Fingall, on the whole perhaps wisely, 
from their own point of view; and such was the environment in 
which Pearl Merryweather lived and moved and had her being. 
Possibly it accounted for many warps and excrescences in her charac- 
ter otherwise sadly perplexing to those who, in spite of them, loved 
her very dearly. Of this number — it was not large — the foremost 
was Mrs. Fursden, her father’s half-sister, widowed like Lady Dai- 
ry tuple, but, unlike her, poor and unworldly, and living contentedly 
on a miserable pittance in the most unfashionable quarter of Fingall. 

Between St. Bridget’s Place, with its dilapidated railings and 
weedy walks and ill-kept shrubbery and the stately beech avenues 
of Monmouth Square, where the youth and beauty of the city were 
wont to congregate on Sunday afternoons, there was a social gulf 
fixed that very few persons had the temerity to attempt to cross. 
The foul and turbid river on which the town was built was far more 
easily bridged. 

“One must draw the line somewhere,” Lady Dalrymple would 
observe, airily, with a delicate inflation of her high-bred nostrils 
suggestive of an unpleasant whiff from the quays. “ I draw it at St. 
Bridget’s Place. People who live there really ought not to expect 
to be visited.” Accordingly, she did not visit Mrs. Fursden more 
than two or three times in the year, when she would drive in state 
in her grand barouche, bringing with her a bouquet of costly exotics 
as a kind of disinfectant against the various diseases supposed to 
haunt these unfashionable regions. 

She sometimes had the grace to leave the flowers behind her, but 
she never troubled herself to show any other civility to Pearl’s 
nearest relative. If she could have helped it, Pearl herself should 
have seen little or nothing of her father’s half-sister. 

As it was, the girl’s visits were fewer and farther between than 
they ought to have been, but she met with no reproach from Mrs. 
Fursden ; and if there was one human being on earth whom Pearl 
thoroughly loved and revered it was her aunt Emily. To her sym- 
pathetic ear alone did she ever confide her trials, misgivings, and 
discontents; with her alone did she ever indulge in that curiously 
seductive, yet sometimes subtly perilous occupation best described 
as thinking aloud. 


THINKING ALOUD 


13 


It is a rest, doubtless, to be in company where this is possible, al- 
though such repose may occasionally be more narcotic than health- 
ful. One is not always the better for having unburdened one’s 
heart, and given words to one’s vague perplexities ; but in the present 
instance Pearl was at least not the worse for having been compelled 
to look her feminine vanity in the face, and she returned to her 
home in a mood of greater earnestness than usual. 

It was wrong, she said to herself, musingly, to let this man hover 
about her, and keep him dangling after her, if she did not in the end 
mean to accept him. On the other hand, was it not quite possible 
that she might do worse than accept him? 

Aunt Emily herself had seemed to wonder at first at her hesita- 
tion, but after that long searching scrutiny from Mrs. Fursden’s soft 
brown eyes, Pearl knew that it would be quite useless to try to de- 
ceive her aunt as to her motives, inasmuch as she could no longer 
deceive herself. 

Her cheeks burned a little as she leaned back in the carriage, and 
gave herself tip to a dreamy retrospect of the past few weeks of her 
life. For, strange to say, her present difficulty was of no further 
date ; yet it already seemed quite a long time since she had first seen 
this lover’s keen glances turned on her, eloquent with that mysteri- 
ous glow of passion that may either warm or consume the object of 
it, according as a man fears God or loves himself. 

Pearl was not unused to such glances. She had met them before, 
and they had left her as cold and unmoved as they had found her. 
These did not indeed move her, but they made her wish greatly that 
she could be moved. So far, the only result of Mr. Lewis’s devout 
though silent worship had been, as it were, to break up the fallow 
ground of the girl’s hitherto untouched heart. She had never known 
that she was romantic; she had never guessed how fervently she 
longed for the experience of a grande passion until she found her- 
self beloved by this man whom, as her instinct had told her from 
the first, she could never love in return. Nay, paradoxical as the 
sentiment may appear, if she had liked him less she could more 
easily have married him. 

She had spoken the truth when she said that he was not like 
other men ; neither had he done his wooing after the ordinary man- 
ner. 

He had never paid her compliments, or talked to her about him- 
self; two of the signs by which men are most wont to testify their 
feelings for a woman. What he had done was to take it for grant- 


14 


THE PRICE OF A PEARL 


ed that she was actuated by the same motives and principles which 
ruled his own life ; and it was the consciousness that he thus judged 
her which caused Pearl so many painful searchings of heart when 
confronted, as she very soon was, with the certainty that he desired 
to make her his wife. She had been in turns coquettish, capricious, 
and imperious with her other lovers; to him she was always gentle 
and winning. Naturally, he argued favorably from this marked dis- 
tinction in her manner of treating him. 

And, although she was by no means insincere in her bearing 
towards him, she had an uneasy misgiving that it was giving him an 
erroneous impression of her real character. Then her conscience 
would step in and speak to her in terms scarcely less distinct than 
those which Mrs. Fursden had employed this very morning. 

“ Leave him alone in future,” her aunt had said to her, with the 
severely righteous instinct of a good woman. Pearl had said it to 
herself more than once before to-day. 

Her meditations were. brought to a sudden halt by the carriage 
drawing up before her own door. 

“Has Mr. Stephen come back?” she asked of the white-haired 
old butler who opened it. 

“Come and gone, miss. He left this card for you.” 

Pearl took it with languid curiosity, smiling to herself as she 
passed on to the morning-room at the back of the house, and read 
her brother’s missive. 

“ Met a fellow I knew at Oxford, but forget his name. Find it 
out if you can, and tell the old girl to be civil.” 

“ How like Stephen to forget his name !” thought Pearl, divided 
between amusement and dismay at the prospect of having to tackle 
a defenceless stranger introduced thus vaguely into a society which 
was nothing if not exclusive ; “ and as for Aunt Cecilia being civil,” 
she further reflected, anxiously, “ that she never was, and never will 
be, unless she knows who people are.” 

She looked back upon this incident later with strangely-mingled 
feelings, for the Fates had decreed that it was to be of more than 
ordinary significance. Somewhat of the man’s after life was indeed 
forecast by that blank space in Stephen’s mental tablets. 


CHAPTER III 


WITHOUT A NAME 

“A woman never forgets her sex; she would rather talk with a man than an 
angel any day.” 

At precisely half-past seven o’clock, in the evening of that same 
May day, the door of Lady Dalrymple’s palatial residence was 
opened to one of the thirty guests whom she had bidden to her ban- 
quet. He was a very young man, so young indeed that a woman of 
his own age would, in all probability, have described him as a boy ; 
and his smooth cheeks had not quite lost the trick of blushing, for 
the fact that his name was called out three times before he reached 
the top of the great staircase, caused him both to feel and to look 
slightly embarrassed when it was finally announced at the drawing- 
room door, and he himself was ushered into the presence of a stiff, 
middle-aged lady and a gentleman with a somewhat military bear- 
ing, a square jaw, an iron - gray mustache, and a pair of gold- 
rimmed spectacles. Both these individuals made a conventional but 
smileless bow to the new-comer, and the lady further vouchsafed 
the information that Lady Dalrymple would be down shortly. 

The young man looked puzzled, but made some incoherent mur- 
mur by way of reply, at the same time inwardly heaping anathemas 
upon the head of “that ass Merry weather ” for having “let him in 
for such a funereal sort of entertainment.” 

Being invited to sit down, he dropped into an easy-chair, that 
surprised him by its exceeding depth and luxury, and in some curi- 
osity proceeded to glance around at the two lofty rooms whose un- 
usual size was rendered the more impressive by t'he fact of their be- 
ing all but empty and very dimly lighted. He could see, however, 
that they differed widely from the ordinary run of town drawing- 
rooms. The inevitable folding-doors peculiar to most of these were 
here replaced by a stately archway. 

Moreover, in an age when white -and -gold paper was still con- 
sidered deriyueur , the walls of Lady Dalrymple’ s rooms were pan- 
elled after the manner of an Italian palace, and were decidedly re- 


16 


THE PRICE OF A PEARL 


freshing in consequence to the eyes of such as had the courage 
honestly to dislike the prevailing mode of upholstery. Likewise, 
there were soft, warm red bangings to the immense windows, of a 
color that the young man remembered to have seen sometimes as a 
boy in pictures at the National Gallery — a sort of rich yet sombre 
hue that at once threw up and toned down everything to which it 
served as a background. 

In the other room he could make out the presence of a grand 
piano and a long row of something that looked like organ pipes, 
which further excited his boyish interest, and he had just begun to 
meditate a closer inspection when the door opened, and a young 
lady unannounced and unaccompanied came swiftly forward. 

Both men stood up immediately. Her eyes were fixed on the 
elder, who was already half-way down the room to meet her, when 
they were arrested by the sight of the stranger, and she paused for a 
moment, her lips half-parted, her head inclined with a kind of gra- 
cious hesitation, and her hand slightly extended. It was in that 
moment that the youth saw her before him as a brilliant picture 
against the warm red background of the curtains. Years after- 
wards he could see it still, not less vividly than he saw it then ; and 
the gracious memory of that first vision could still shake him, as 
leaves are shaken by the wind. 

The next instant she approached him and said, politely : 

“ My brother told me to expect you. How kind of you to take 
pity on us, and come at such short notice. I hope I am not very 
late myself ?” 

“ I was afraid I was too early,” he replied, a little bashfully ; 
“but Mer — your brother, I mean — said half-past seven.” 

“Yes. I wish our other guests would be as punctual. Mr. 
Lewis, I make no apology to yow,” turning to him with an irresisti- 
ble smile. “You know me by this time.” 

Alas ! it was quite evident that Mr. Lewis did know her, and, 
moreover, that he had, or fancied that he had, some sort of property 
in her, for he sat down as a matter of course at her side, and twirled 
his grizzled mustache as he talked to her in a way that made the 
young man painfully and even angrily conscious of his own almost 
total deficiency in the matter of beard on the upper-lip. 

Fortunately there was neither time nor opportunity for the indul- 
gence of these inimical sentiments on his part, for the guests now 
began to muster thick, and made their appearance with such rapid- 
ity as fairly to bewilder a stranger like himself. 


WITHOUT A NAME 


17 


They seemed to be of all ages and degrees. There were grave 
parsons and smart officers and anxious-eyed matrons and sunny- 
haired maidens, and they all glanced with more or less curiosity at 
the nameless youth who stood shyly behind a large arm-chair and 
sincerely wished himself invisible. 

The room was full, or nearly so, as it seemed to his unsophisti- 
cated eyes, when the door was once more thrown open, and a tall, 
white-haired old lady, blazing with diamonds, and gorgeous in vio- 
let velvet, came slowly forward with the air of a royal personage 
accustomed not merely to respect but to reverence. 

This presumably was Lady Dalryrnple; but why in the name of 
wonder did she not receive her guests herself, instead of being re- 
ceived by them in this viceregal fashion ? 

The youth was puzzled, as he had been more than once already, 
and, uncertain as to what etiquette required of him, he retired a 
little into the background, hoping to escape further observation 
until the move should be made to the dining-room. 

He saw the beautiful old lady, for such she certainly was, in 
spite of her manners, shaking hands with one, smiling to another, 
and bowing majestically to a third, and he was beginning to ask 
himself in amazement whether all this was a dream when dinner 
was announced, and Pearl’s voice fell pleasantly on his ear. 

“ You are to take me down, please,” she said, consulting a sheet 
of paper, which she held in her hand, where, if he had only known 
it, his own name was represented by a note of interrogation. “ No, 
not just yet,” as he hastened to offer her his arm. “ We must let 
our betters go first ; I belong to the house.” 

They waited accordingly while the various couples filed past, the 
long procession being headed by Mr. Lewis, whose social position 
rendered it necessary that he should take down the lady of highest 
rank present. 

Unlike the majority of dinner-guests he would gladly have had 
a lower place assigned to him, a fact of which Pearl was well aware, 
although she discreetly dropped her eyelids when he passed out 
before her. 

There were two tables in the large brilliantly lighted dining-room, 
set T-shape under a great Venetian glass chandelier. To the upper 
of these boards Pearl skilfully pioneered her unknown companion, 
and with laudable presence of mind contrived to abstract from his 
plate the blank card which would have betrayed her ignorance of 
his identity. 


18 


TIIE PRICE OF A PEARL 


Just opposite, in the place of honor, stood Mr. Lewis, twirling 
the ends of his mustache with an air of moody preoccupation 
scarcely flattering to his neighbor, and in the brief pause before 
grace Miss Merry weather permitted herself to look across and meet 
his eyes, which, blinking and short-sighted as they were, yet man- 
aged to convey his disappointment to herself in no uncertain lan- 
guage. 

Turning from him to the nameless youth at her side, she was not 
a little amused to detect a slight frown on his smooth boyish coun- 
tenance, as though the little by-play which he had just witnessed 
were distinctly displeasing to him. 

He was older than she had at first supposed ; that was evident. 
There were signs of mental power in the well-cut face, its changing 
color notwithstanding, and there was a sort of hidden flame in the 
clear blue eyes which told of a passionate and keenly sensitive 
nature. 

Why had Stephen never spoken to her before, she asked herself, 
about this college acquaintance, whose very name he could not ap- 
parently take the trouble to retain in his memory, but who stood 
out with unusual relief from the majority of such friends as had 
yet been made known to his sister? 

“Do you know any one here to-night?” she asked him, seeing 
that his eyes were travelling swiftly, if also very shyly, up and 
down both tables. 

He started, and the ready blood rushed into his face. 

“No. I don’t. You see I’m a total stranger, only arrived last 
night. It was odd that I should stumble on your brother the first 
thing this morning.” 

“ It was very fortunate for us, I think,” said Pearl, with a gra- 
ciousness designed to set her youthful guest at his ease, but whose 
only apparent result was to put him into a greater agony of shy- 
ness than before. 

“I — it was awfully good of you to have me, but — as I 
told your brother, I haven’t been much in the way of going out 
lately.” 

“ No,” thought Pearl, “ that is quite evident, or you wouldn’t 
blush so furiously when a lady addresses you.” 

Aloud, however, she said, very pleasantly : 

“ Then it was high time you should begin, and I can assure you 
that both my aunt and I are very grateful to you.” 

“ I suppose that lady in violet velvet is Lady Dalrymple?” 


WITHOUT A NAME 


10 


“Yes, I must introduce you after dinner;” but at the same mo- 
ment Pearl remembered with dismay that she was as far off as ever 
from knowing whom she was to introduce. 

“ And the gentleman sitting opposite, is he in the army ?” 

“No; why should you think he was?” and Pearl looked with 
new eyes at the grave countenance and the clean-cut square jaw of 
her middle-aged admirer. 

“Because he wears a mustache; so I supposed he must be an 
officer.” 

The young man’s tone was slightly disapproving, and implied 
that a civilian had no right to dispense with whiskers. 

And indeed this was the general opinion in society at the time 
of which I write. 

Pearl laughed — a gay, musical laugh that fell upon Mr. Lewis’s 
ear through all the din and clatter going on around him, and caused 
him to glance across the table with a half-reproachful air, as who 
should say, “ Why do you never laugh like that for me?” 

It had the effect, moreover, of breaking the ice between herself 
and her unknown visitor, for the youth perceived at once that there 
was no mockery in it, though much merriment. 

“ It’s a free country,” she said, demurely; “and though he is not 
an officer, I must tell you that in his own line Mr. Lewis is a com- 
mander-in-chief.” 

“ Yes? How is that? What does he command?” 

“ A regiment of clerks, I fancy, and numberless societies and 
companies, and that sort of thing. He is the head of the great 
firm of Lewis & Ormeth waite that you have probably often heard of.” 

“ Oh yes, to be sure ; had checks on them now and again. It is 
one of the biggest banks in existence, I believe.” 

“ So they say, and Mr. Lewis has just given my brother a desk 
in the counting-house.” 

“What? Merry weather !” and the young man’s tone, no less 
than his face, was eloquent of amused astonishment. 

“ Yes. Don’t you think he has fallen on his feet this time?” 

“Well, I don’t know. Does he think so himself?” the youth 
asked, with growing audacity. 

“ His friends do, and I hope you won’t let him think he is to 
be pitied.” 

Pearl spoke lightly, but there was none the less a little real 
anxiety underlying the words, and her companion was swift to per- 
ceive it. 


20 


THE PRICE OF A PEARL 


“You may be quite certain, Miss Merry weather, that I pity no 
one in this world who has got any honest work to do.” 

Half-unconsciously the girl’s eyes sought his, as if to read there 
what manner of spirit it was that ruled his life and prompted him 
to speak thus. Bashful as he had been a few moments before, he 
did not shrink now from this searching scrutiny, hut met it with 
a steady gaze that betokened absolute sincerity. 

“ Ah,” said Pearl, more wistfully than she was at all aware, “ I 
wish you could persuade Stephen to agree with you.” 

“And can’t you persuade him yourself, Miss Merry weather ?” 

“Can sisters ever persuade their brothers to anything?” 

“ I’m sorry to say I never had a sister, so I’m afraid I can’t pro- 
nounce judgment on that point; but — if I were Merry weather — ” 
he broke off with a shy smile that told its own story. 

“ Miss Merry weather seems to be amusing herself,” observed Mr. 
Lewis’s neighbor, with a note of dry disapproval in her voice which 
he secretly resented, although he had certainly arrived at much the 
same conclusion himself. 

But perhaps they were both mistaken. In the present instance 
the girl was not so much amused as interested. The refreshing 
earnestness of her unknown companion, his naif simplicity, and 
his boyish manner were more or less noYel to her experience. She 
felt as if she had begun to read a new story, although both title 
and authorship were still withheld from her. 

“ There is one thing that puzzles me,” she said to him towards 
the close of dinner, when her godmother’s signal for departure was 
momentarily expected. “ Don’t be surprised at what I’m going to 
say, and don’t misunderstand me : but how is it that you and my 
brother ever became great friends? You don’t strike me as having 
a single idea in common.” 

“ But,” said the young man, looking decidedly perplexed in his 
turn, “did your brother tell you that we were great friends?” 

Pause, in which Pearl racked her brains to remember exactly 
what it was that Stephen had said beyond the bare fact that he 
knew this fellow and had forgotten his name. 

“ Perhaps,” she answered, slowly, “ I may have misunderstood 
him.” 

“ Because — well, I mean, of course we got on and all that, hut we 
never saw very much of each other at Oxford. I couldn’t have af- 
forded to keep the sort of company that he did.” 

“Would you if you could?” asked Pearl, rather meaningly, and 


WITHOUT A NAME 21 

again her eyes were brought to bear upon him with a fascination 
by no means involuntary or unconscious. 

By the tone of his voice as he answered her she knew that he was 
dazzled, as she meant he should be. 

“ I always liked your brother, Miss Merryweather, better than any 
of his friends.” * 

Lady Dalrymple rose at the same moment, but her goddaughter 
found time for one word more of the sort that few men readily for- 
get from the lips of such a maiden. 

“That was very charmingly said, and I can only wish that you 
yourself were one of his friends.” 

From the expression of the young man’s face as he made way for 
Pearl to pass out before him, it was impossible for Mr. Lewis to 
doubt any longer that “Miss Merryweather had been amusing her- 
self.” 

As for the girl herself, she remembered suddenly that she was 
about to be confronted by a regiment of inquisitive women, and that 
to the first and most simple question of their probable catechism she 
could return no answer whatever. 


CHAPTER IV 


QUESTION AND ANSWER 

“ I think there’s never a man in Christendom 
That can less hide his love or hate than he ; 

For by his face straight shall you know his heart.” 

“ My dear Miss Merry weather, you really are too cruel ! Mr. 
Lewis was in positive torture the whole of dinner-time.” 

“ With Lady Lowick beside him ! I can scarcely believe that.” 

Pearl spoke in those smooth, polished accents which always made 
her hearers — her feminine hearers more especially — so dreadfully 
afraid that she was laughing at them. 

“It was really unkind to sit just opposite — so tantalizing for him, 
poor man !” pursued her ladyship, with a furtive glance at the long- 
mirror which reflected one of Worth’s latest marvels, and likewise 
her own small, dark, fuzzy head, adorned at the present moment 
with a coronet of diamonds. 

It was commonly reported in Fingall that Lady Lowick slept with 
those diamonds under her pillow, from which the inference may 
very naturally be drawn that they were not heirlooms. 

Her husband had, in fact, only recently been promoted to the 
peerage, and now sat in the Upper House as the first Baron Lowick; 
why, no one exactly knew, except that he had made a colossal fort- 
une out of cotton-spinning, having inherited this business from his 
father, who in his turn had begun life as a mill-hand. For the rest, 
the family name of Watson was scarcely suggestive of a very high 
origin. 

Lady Lowick was, however, a great lady — at least, in her own 
estimation, and second only to her hostess as a leader of Fingall so- 
ciety; but it may be said that life was more or less poisoned to her 
because she was not absolutely the first. 

There is no denying that the wife of a baron is entitled to walk 
out of the room before the widow of a baronet, but Lady Lowick 
could not be satisfied with mere precedence. Her best endeavors 
could never impart to her manner that peculiar mixture of dignity 


QUESTION AND ANSWER 


23 


and impudence which was the real secret of Lady Dal rym pie’s un- 
disputed social sway. There was indeed no lack of the latter ingre- 
dient in the younger lady’s composition (her enemies were so unkind 
as to say that she had more than her share), but nature had denied 
to her the smallest trace of the former. 

She looked, alas ! quite painfully insignificant this evening beside 
Miss Merry weather, whose white silk gown was characterized by a 
severe yet splendid simplicity that made the other’s more fashion- 
able toilette appear almost tawdry. 

“Just opposite,” repeated Pearl, carelessly, in answer to the charge 
of cruelty that had been brought against her. “ Let me see, I forget 
how the tables were arranged.” 

“ Not to his liking, I can assure you. Who is your young friend? 
I don’t think I know his face.” 

“ Probably not, as he only arrived yesterday. He kindly replaced 
Lord Bertie Meredith, who disappointed us early this morning.” 

“ So like Bertie !” ejaculated Lady Lowick, with an air of uneasy 
familiarity. 

Her pursuit of this luckless scion of an old and noble race as a 
husband for her daughter was an open secret in Fingall, and excited 
much mirth among such as recognized the utter futility of it. 

“ Do you find, then, that he is in the habit of breaking his engage- 
ments?” asked Pearl, blandly. 

“ Well, of course every one must have some difficulty in nailing 
him down ; he seems to have so many claims on his time.” 

“So people say; but we have always found him willing to come 
here whenever he was asked.” 

“And yet it appears he failed you at the last moment?” 

“Yes. He had to attend a funeral in town, so of course we had 
to fill up his place as best we could. And my brother, by great 
good-fortune, lighted on this college acquaintance of his.” 

“What did you say his name was?” 

“ I don’t think I could have mentioned it, because I don’t know 
it myself.” 

“ Didn’t your brother tell you ?” And Lady Lowick opened her 
eyes very wide at the idea of having dined at the same board with 
a nameless stranger, who had been brought in, as it were, out of the 
public highway. 

“No,” replied Pearl, with provoking indifference to her ladyship’s 
evident disapproval. “Stephen unfortunately omitted that part of 
the ceremony.” 


24 


THE PRICE OF A PEARL 


“But wasn’t the young man announced, like any one else?” 

“ 1 suppose he was, but I hadn’t come in myself, and his name 
seems to have been lost on Miss Seaford, for she could tell me 
nothing.” 

“I get so confused,” murmured that lady in an apologetic paren- 
thesis, of which no one took the smallest notice. 

“But how disagreeable for you,” said Lady Lowick, pointedly, 
“ not to know anything about him ; and I imagine that your broth- 
er’s friends are not particularly congenial to you.” 

“Not at all as a general rule, but I think I said this young man 
was only an acquaintance.” 

“ He seemed to be a gentleman,” said Pearl’s godmother, who 
had been listening all this time to the passage-of-arms in which she 
was quite prepared to back the younger of the two combatants. 

“Oh, of course,” retorted Lady Lowick, “or Miss Merry weather 
would hardly have found so much to say to him. At all events, it 
was very plain indeed that Mr. Lewis wanted to change places with 
him.” 

“ Most people would be glad, I should fancy, to change places 
with Mr. Lewis,” Pearl answered, lightly. 

She knew that an inquisitive audience was hanging upon every 
word she might let fall this evening, and she played her part accord- 
ingly, with a skill and coolness worthy of a less ignoble cause. 

“How long does he think of remaining in Fingall? Have you 
any idea?” pursued Lady Lowick, bent if possible on forcing the 
girl’s hand, if only for the sake of annoying her hostess. 

“ Not the slightest. I suppose until he has negotiated this loan 
with the Corporation, or whatever it may be that he is up here for.” 

“ My dear Miss Merry weather, surely you can’t expect any of us 
to believe that you don’t know what he is up here for, or at least 
what he is staying on for ?” 

“ Well, indeed, he did tell me,” Pearl answered, in a tone of the 
most exasperating innocence, “but Pm afraid I have forgotten. It 
was something about a loan. We can ask him when he comes up 
from the dining-room.” 

Lady Lowick’s gesture as she turned away was scarcely worthy of 
her high calling — as she conceived of it. Even the glitter of the 
diamonds in the opposite mirror could not make up for the fact that 
this chit of a girl had worsted her. 

It was a custom with Lady Dalrymple fo hold large evening recep- 
tions after dinner-parties. Accordingly, the two drawing-rooms 


QUESTION AND ANSWER 


25 


were already filled to overflowing when the gentlemen came up from 
their wine, and the anteroom and recess on the staircase were being 
used as chapels of ease by the younger guests of both sexes. The 
recess in particular was much sought after as leading to the con- 
servatory, which in its turn opened upon a fancifully laid- out 
fernery, brilliantly lighted up with Chinese lanterns, and full of 
winding paths and misleading stairs — fit emblems, both of them, of 
the multifarious flirtations carried on within these labyrinthine pre- 
cincts. 

Mr. Lewis, being to a certain extent acquainted with the ways of 
the house, paused on his upward journey from the dining-room, and 
stood for a moment or two on the landing, in hopes of distinguish- 
ing Pearl’s voice among the murmuring couples there assembled. 

The middle-aged lady who had received him, and who was known 
in this establishment by the cognomen of “ the dragon,” was hover- 
ing about like an unquiet spirit, from which circumstance he at once 
augured that the object of his search must be somewhere in the im- 
mediate neighborhood. 

“Lady Dalrymple wishes me to find Miss Merry weather,” she be- 
gan, nervously. 

“Yes? Can I be of any use?” 

Mr. Lewis’s smile was expressive of reassurance. It is seldom 
that dragons are so complacent as to act as pointers, and his spirits, 
which had been more or less depressed all the evening, began to rise 
at the pleasurable prospect now opening before him. 

“ I don’t like to trouble you, Mr. Lewis, but — Lady Dalrymple 
always worries herself if I cannot tell her exactly where Miss Merry- 
weather is and what she is doing.” 

Poor Miss Seaford ! Her post was indeed no sinecure, and she 
earned very little thanks in her discharge of the onerous duties at- 
tached to it either from Pearl or from her patroness. 

“ One does not exactly care to interrupt a tete-a-tete,” observed 
Mr. Lewis, with a grave smile that had the effect of calling up a 
slight blush on the unfortunate duenna’s harassed countenance. 

“If you do not go, Mr. Lewis, I fear that I must. Lady Dal- 
ryraple particularly wished that Miss Merryweather should put on 
this shawl if she was going to remain in the conservatory.” 

“That settles the question.” 

Mr. Lewis took the shawl, and walked boldly through the shadowy 
groups of young men and maidens who bad taken possession of the 
recess, and now drew themselves up as he passed by with looks of 


26 


THE PRICE OF A PEARL 


ill-concealed interest and curiosity. There was a vague impression 
among them that the man was approaching those closed doors much 
as the pagans of old used to approach the oracle of Delphi — to learn 
his fate. Miss Seaford glided away forthwith, her mission being 
ended for the present. In two minutes more Lady Dalrymple was 
acquainted with the situation, and appeared to entertain no further 
anxiety on her goddaughter’s behalf. 

Meanwhile, Pearl’s youthful neighbor had made his way up-stairs, 
and was now looking about him in blank dismay. He was sur- 
rounded by strangers, and his only friend was nowhere to be seen. 

Young and pretty women there were in abundance, and they 
looked at him in undisguised curiosity, for a new male face was not 
to be seen as a matter of course, even at Lady Dalrymple’s parties. 

Such, however, was the young man’s agony of shyness at finding 
himself in this surging mass of tulle, gossamer, and broadcloth, that 
he could not bring himself to face any one. Hot and miserable, he 
was borne along with the crowd until he reached the inner drawing- 
room, where Lady Dalrymple was lying back in the depth of a 
large, throne-like easy-chair, looking for all the world like an elderly 
empress surrounded by obsequious courtiers. 

To his unspeakable dismay, her eyes presently fastened them- 
selves on him, and she beckoned to him to approach her. The 
young man obeyed at once, but no debutante at her first drawing- 
room ever blushed more deeply than he did when, all eyes being 
turned full upon him, he stood before his hostess. 

“ How do you do?” she said, extending her hand graciously, and 
pointing to a low seat beside her. “ It was very good of you to 
come to me at such short notice.” 

“Oh, not at all !” he replied, awkwardly, with that want of pres- 
ence of mind which makes one rude where one means to be polite. 

“I hope that Stephen Merry weather apologized for its being nec- 
essarily so short?” 

“ Oh yes, he was very civil. I quite understood, thanks.” 

“ The gentleman whom you were so kind as to replace is a very 
great friend of ours, Lord Bertie Meredith. Have you ever met 
him ?” 

“Bertie Meredith! Is he here?” and the young man’s face 
brightened so visibly that Ladj Dalrymple actually took the trouble 
to rouse herself from her attitude of graceful indolence. 

“ He is living here at present,” she said. 

“I had no idea of that. I’m awfully glad.” 


QUESTION AND ANSWER 


27 


“ He is a friend of yours ?” 

Lady Dalrymple’s tone became more gracious every instant. She 
might, perhaps, have distrusted the evidence of her own senses, 
which were inclined to bear favorable witness to her guest’s respect- 
ability, but she could not possibly reject such credentials as were 
implied in his acquaintance with Lord Bertie Meredith. 

“ A great friend. I haven’t seen him, though, for some time. He 
has been abroad, hasn’t he ?” 

“It would be hard to say where he has not been. You knew 
him, I suppose, at Oxford?” 

“ Yes, but he left the year before I did. I wonder what he can 
be doing up here ? It is the last place where I should have ex- 
pected to find him.” 

“ If he were any one else, I should say he was wasting his time. 
He goes in, I understand, for philanthropic work of some sort.” 

“ He used to do that at Oxford, and he got diphtheria in conse- 
quence.” 

“ As far as I can see,” observed her ladyship, smilingly, “ that, or 
some similar illness, is the only consequence that ever comes of 
working in the slums.” 

“Oh, well, I don’t know,” said Bertie’s friend, apologetically. 
“ He did no end of good at Oxford. He’s an awfully good fellow.” 

“ A great deal too good, I fear, for this wicked world ; just the 
sort of quixotic creature to be taken in at every turn.” 

“ Do you think so ?” And there was evident surprise in the young 
man’s tone as he put the question, which seemed to imply that his 
estimate of Lord Bertie’s character differed considerably from that 
of Lady Dalrymple. 

She smiled down at him indulgently. 

“He seems to have a very stanch friend in you, Mr. — Dear 
me! I’m very stupid about names. I have quite forgotten what 
my niece said yours was.” 

He would have been much more versed in the ways of polite so- 
ciety than he was if he had guessed even dimly that she was telling 
him a falsehood. Nevertheless, since it is more or less unpleasant 
to have to reveal one’s own identity, his face burned quite guiltily, 
as he answered : 

“ My name is Hector MacAdam.” 

Lady Dalrymple pricked up her ears immediately. 

“Any relation to the MacAdams of Adamscourt?” she asked, a 
little eagerly. 


28 


THE PRICE OF A PEARL 


“ I am MacAdam of Adamsconrt — that is to say, I mean my 
father is. He lives there.” 

“ Can it be possible? I thought your face was curiously familiar 
to me. Are you a son of David MacAdam ?” 

“ He was my uncle. My father’s name is Hector, like my own.” 

“I don’t remember him. I suppose he was a younger brother.” 

“ He is the only one left now.” 

“ Then when did he inherit Adamscourt ?” 

“Only about four years ago. He was in India when my cousin 
died.” 

“In India?” she repeated; “in the Civil Service? Was it your 
father who refused the baronetcy?” 

“ What baronetcy ? I never heard that he had been offered one,” 
and young MacAdam looked decidedly mystified. 

“ If he is the man I mean, he certainly was offered it, and as cer- 
tainly refused it, for I remember hearing all about it at the time. 
Was your father ever at a place called Hattarabad ?” 

“He was commissioner there for some years, and did very good 
work, I believe, during the famine.” 

“ Exactly ; and that was why they offered him the baronetcy. It 
was curious that he should have refused it, wasn’t it ?” 

“ I suppose he thought the title would be of no use to me. He 
never expected to get Adamscourt, I know.” 

“ Then are you the eldest son, Mr. MacAdam ?” 

“ I’m sorry to say I’m the only son now. My brother was 
drowned, poor fellow, in his first term at Oxford.” 

“ Dear me ! How unfortunate ! And have you no sisters, 
either ?” 

“No,” said the youth, rather abruptly. “There is no one at 
home now but my father.” 

“ And how does it come to pass that you have left him by him- 
self?” pursued the inquisitive old dame, secretly well pleased at the 
result of her many and searching inquiries. 

No mother, no sister to complicate matters and make things disa- 
greeable for an incoming daughter-in-law. And no doubt the father 
would be quite content that his only son should marry early. It 
would really be a most desirable connection in every way, and Pearl 
would grace the situation particularly well, unless, indeed — 

“ Why, my dear child, how you have startled me ! Some one 
said you were in the fernery.” 

This exclamation was called forth by the sudden apparition of 


QUESTION AND ANSWER 


29 


her goddaughter at a moment when she was supposed to have been 
safely disposed of for the next hour at least. 

“ Only twenty minutes !” she reflected, anxiously, glancing at the 
tiny watch she wore in a diamond bracelet on her wrist. “ What 
can they have been doing?” 

But the expression of Pearl’s face, half-mocking, half-apologetic, 
was calculated to baffle all inquiry. 

“ It is time we had some music,” said the girl, coolly, taking no 
notice of her godmother’s implied question, but finding time to 
bestow a bewitching little nod of recognition on her former neigh- 
bor, whose telltale countenance was aflame with eager satisfaction. 

“By all means,” replied her ladyship. “Mr. MacAdam, you 
had better stay here. You will hear much better than in the next 
room.” 

Very reluctantly did the youth obey this admonition, and very 
longing were the eyes that followed Pearl as she threaded her way 
through the crowd with that perfect grace of bearing which had al- 
ready enthralled his fancy. 

A moment or two more and the loud hubbub of voices had sud- 
denly ceased. A curious hush of expectation fell upon the throng, 
as it became known that Miss Merryweather was going to sing, and 
all heads were turned in the direction of the grand-piano. 

There was no prelude to the song which she had chosen. With- 
out even an opening chord, she let forth her clear notes upon the 
perfect silence of the densely crowded rooms. To most of those 
who listened it was unfamiliar music, too original and quaint to be 
even intelligible to such as cared only for the ordinary drawing- 
room ballad, with its commonplace phrases and cheap terms of en- 
dearment. 

But one there was who heard her with a choking throat and 
quickened pulse, and when the song was ended she found him at 
her elbow. 

“I know that song!” he exclaimed, breathlessly. “My mother 
used to sing it, and I heard you sing it this morning.” 

“ This morning,” she repeated, dreamily, and the expression of 
her green eyes might well have dazzled an older and a wiser man 
than Hector MacAdam. “ Then was it you who stopped to listen ?” 

“ I couldn’t help it,” he murmured. “ It was one of my mother’s 
songs, and you sang it just as she did.” 

“Did?” asked the girl, with a world of sympathetic meaning in 
that monosyllabic question. 


30 


THE PRICE OF A PEARL 


The buzz of voices had begun again, yet through it all she heard 
the break in his voice, as he answered, simply : 

“ Two years ago I lost her.” 

“ And I have brought her back to you ?” 

“As no one ever did before. Your voice has been sounding in 
my ears all day.” 

But even as he spoke he knew that the earlier sound had been 
obliterated by the later vision. He might well have forgotten the 
first, but all his life long he must remember the second. 


CHAPTER V 


CALLED TO ACCOUNT 

“ II est un temperament qui la Providence inflige & certains hommes qu’elle 
maudit. . . . Ils demandent aux femmes, non pas mieux mais autre que ce 
qu’elles sont.” 

“You’re a very foolish girl, Pearl. Have you ever considered 
that this sort of thing can’t go on to all eternity ?” 

It was nearly midnight. Lady Dalrymple, to quote her god- 
daughter’s irreverent expression, had been carefully taken to pieces, 
and was now sitting in rather a witchlike attitude over her bed- 
room fire. The thick snowy white plaits were replaced by her own 
scanty grizzled hair ; the pearly teeth had gone to bed for the night, 
the paint and powder had likewise vanished. She was a handsome 
old woman still, but hard and withered like a wintry apple. And 
her glittering eyes were not of a sort to inspire much spontaneous 
confidence from the young and inexperienced. Pearl was under 
cross-examination, it is true, as her manner testified; but since she 
was not on oath, she did not think it necessary to tell the whole 
truth in her answers to the old lady’s searching questions. 

“ What sort of thing is it that can’t go on to all eternity ?” she 
said, carelessly. 

“You know very well what I mean. It is not every day that a 
man like Mr. Lewis will give you the refusal of him, and some day 
you will be glad to take any one you can get to ask you.” 

Pearl’s smile was not insolent, but it was sufficiently incredulous 
to be provoking. 

“ You won’t always be young and beautiful,” pursued her god- 
mother, with unflattering sincerity. 

“ I am not beautiful now,” replied Pearl, very quietly. 

“ Pooh, nonsense, child ! Don’t contradict me. In the eyes of a 
man like Mr. Lewis you are better than beautiful. You are unique.” 

“ Naturally, since he is in love ; but, as you always tell me, that 
never lasts.” 

“ What is your objection to Mr. Lewis?” 


32 


THE PRICE OF A PEARL 


“ My objection is that he thinks me other than I am, and un- 
fortunately I can’t persuade him that I know myself best. Mr. 
Lewis is firmly under the impression that I am a good woman.” 

“Really, Pearl, it seems to me a most extraordinary thing that 
you should go out of your way to say that you are anything else.” 

“I am not good, and what is more, I don’t think I want to be 
good in his sense of the word.” 

“ I suppose his sense is very much that of most men when they 
apply it to women.” 

Pearl shook her head. 

“You know him very little, Aunt Cecilia, if you say that.” 

“ I presume lie would not insist on your going into the slums 
with him,” continued Lady Dalrymple, “or entertaining shoe-blacks 
to dinner, or any philanthropic practices of that sort.” 

“He would expect sympathy in all his good works, and I hope 
sincerely he may get it.” 

“You are very silly and irrational. It is quite plain to me that 
you like this man. He has managed to touch you somehow this 
evening, and yet you want to make out that you can’t sympathize 
with him. If you looked at him like that when you told him so, I 
don’t wonder that he wouldn’t believe you.” 

Pearl stood up and looked at herself in the pier-glass over the 
chimney-piece. It was certainly not her every-day face that met 
her there. A strange softness was in her unfathomable eyes, of the 
kind that wiles the very heart out of strong, steadfast men, a quiver 
of regret about the lines of her mouth. Lady Dalrymple had 
spoken truly when she said that, to a man like Mr. Lewis, the girl 
was better than beautiful. With the grace of unconsciousness 
added to her charms, she would have been irresistible in the eyes of 
many besides him. But it was scarcely surprising that this should 
be wanting, considering that Lady Dalryrnple’s training was rather 
calculated to develop the opposite characteristic. 

From her earliest years Pearl had been invited as now, in all but 
the direct words, to take herself, her appearance, and her personality 
generally, into her most careful consideration. 

Lady Dalrymple looked on cynically while the girl scrutinized 
herself to-night in the mirror. 

“ So he would not believe you, Pearl ?” 

“ No, he would not.” 

“Would not take no for an answer? Well, he is a sensible man. 
When is he coming back?” 


CALLED TO ACCOUNT 


33 


“ Next month, I believe. I heard him tell Lady Lowick.” 

“ That will shut her mouth, at all events,” observed Lady Dal- 
rymple, with curt satisfaction. “The vulgar impertinence of that 
woman is past endurance.” 

“ Was Mr. Mac Adam introduced to her after all ? I saw she had 
got hold of him before the end of the evening.” 

“ Not by my agency, I can assure you ; but she is capable of any- 
thing.” 

“ How did you find -out his name?” 

“ I pretended I had forgotten it, so he told me what it was with 
many blushes and some stammering.” 

“He is shy, certainly,” said Pearl, rather thoughtfully, “but 
that’s a fault on the right side after one has had a course of Johnny 
Watson and men of his stamp.” 

“His uncle was shy too,” observed her godmother, and her smile 
was somewhat significant. 

“ Was he a former flame, or what?” asked Pearl, perceiving that 
some such question was almost invited. 

Lady Dalrymple shrugged her shoulders. 

“We used to dance a great deal together. I don’t say that it 
was more than a flirtation, but it was that. This boy has a great 
look of him.” 

“Did you know his father?” 

“ No, the father was a younger son, and younger sons were kept 
out of my way.” 

“ As they are out of mine,” remarked Pearl, placidly. 

“And always shall be,” snapped her ladyship, “as long as I have 
the ordering of your life. When girls make bad matches I blame 
their parents and guardians.” 

“Then I suppose that Lord Bertie is the exception that proves 
the rule.” 

“ Oh, Pm not afraid of him, my dear. I give you the credit for 
better taste than that.” 

“ Won’t you give him credit for more sense?” said the girl, rather 
coldly. 

“My dear, no man has any sense where a woman like you is con- 
cerned. I have no doubt that poor Bertie would have made a fool of 
himself before now if you had given him the smallest encouragement.” 

The remark was allowed to pass unchallenged, but for some rea- 
son or other Pearl looked almost as guilty as if she had been dis- 
covered in a falsehood. 

3 


34 


THE PRICE OF A PEARL 


“ I am going home,” she announced, briefly. 

“ Good-night, and think better of it,” admonished her ladyship, 
as the girl bent over her chair. 

“ I shall not think of it at all if I can help it, for I want to go to 
sleep.” 

Nevertheless, Pearl knew well that her prospects of slumber that 
night were more than doubtful. 

Her godmother, with that superficial shrewdness peculiar to the 
worldly-minded, had hit the nail on the head when she declared 
bluntly that “ the man had somehow managed to touch Pearl ” in 
his interview with her. 

And yet it had been a very short one. She had read his inten- 
tion in his face from the moment that he appeared in the fernery 
with her scarlet chuddah over his arm, and with true feminine 
coquetry she had used a hundred artifices to avoid the tete-a-tete 
on which he was so plainly bent, and of which, if the truth must 
be told, she herself would have been more than half sorry to be 
deprived. 

“ The fernery was chilly,” she said, “ and it would be better, per- 
haps, to go back to the drawing-room.” 

“This will prevent you from feeling chilly,” he replied, putting 
the shawl about her shoulders with a grave, preoccupied air that 
robbed the action of anything like gallantry. 

And yet, as Pearl knew with the unerring instinct of her sex, 
this man was the most devoted lover she had ever had — perhaps 
ever would have. But, whether from apprehension or from real 
chilliness, she shivered a little as she drew the soft, warm folds of 
the shawl around her. 

He saw the involuntary movement, and felt his pulses throb pain- 
fully at the sight. It seemed to augur ill for his chances of success. 

“ I have not seen you the whole evening,” he said, a little re- 
proachfully, moving away with her as he spoke from the group of 
which he had found her the centre. 

“But is that my fault? We had to give you to the great lady, 
you know.” 

“ What had the great lady done to deserve such a fate ?” 

“Probably that is what she is asking herself at the present mo- 
ment. I really must not keep you away from the drawing-room 
any longer, Mr. Lewis.” 

“ I think you know very well that I wish to keep myself away as 
long as I can.” 


CALLED TO ACCOUNT 


35 


“And me, too, apparently ?” she said, with one of those swift up- 
ward glances so peculiarly her own, but of which she never perhaps 
fully appraised the consequences to those on whom she bestowed 
them. 

“ And you, too, certainly,” he replied, arresting the glance with 
his near-sighted eyes, and burning all the coquetry out of it by their 
steady gaze. 

She looked about her rather helplessly. The fernery was all but 
deserted. The admirers and triflers who had been clustering about 
her like flies a few minutes before had melted away, warned off 
probably by the grave, taciturn politeness of this middle-aged Croesus. 

He was not a man to be baffled. Those who could make least of 
him were fain to admit that. And they knew also that, in spite 
of his shortness of vision, blind Bat Lewis, as his friends were in 
the habit of calling him, saw as far into a stone-wall as most men, 
and perhaps farther than many. He saw, for instance, as every one’ 
else did, that Lady Dalrymple had designs on him for her god- 
daughter, but, unlike the great majority of her acquaintances, he was 
aware that Pearl herself hung back. The very gentleness of her 
manner, far from deceiving him, as the girl had feared it might, 
only convinced him that he would have hard work to win her heart, 
and without it he did not care for her hand. 

“ I am leaving Fingall to-morrow,” he said, abruptly. “ Perhaps 
I have stayed too long as it is.” 

“ I am sorry you should think so. No one else does, I am sure.” 

“ I shall not think so myself, Miss Merry weather, if you will tell 
me that I may soon come back.” 

“ You lay a great responsibility on me,” said Pearl, trying to speak 
lightly, “ and you give me no reason for doing so.” 

“ Because I think you know the reason. I feel certain that you 
understand exactly what I mean and what I want. Give me a kind 
answer if you can.” 

It was a curious way of making love, but it had at least the merit 
of novelty in Pearl’s eyes. 

There was more of command than of entreaty both in words and 
manner, and yet she was well aware that a gift had just been offered 
to her compared with which the millions that he was supposed to 
possess were mere dross, not worthy of a thought. Her voice trem- 
bled a little as she answered : 

“ Mr. Lewis, I have been reproaching myself bitterly this very 
day because I feared that I had been too kind hitherto.” 


36 


THE PRICE OF A PEARL 


Silence for a moment or two, in which he turned away his face, 
and set his teeth in a stifled anguish which she felt, though she 
could not see it. 

“ You need not reproach yourself,” he said at last. “ You would 
have been less kind to me if you had cared more.” 

“I — I don’t know,” she said, hesitatingly. “You made me what 
I was. I could not treat you as I did others, but I did not mean — ” 

“ To lead me on ? No, I don’t think you did ; it was my fate 
that led me on. I have met my fate here.” 

“ No, no,” exclaimed Pearl, impulsively, “ not your fate, Mr. Lewis, 
only your fancy — and an unworthy fancy, believe me. You will 
think so yourself some day, and thank me ; but in the meantime I 
wish you had not said this.” 

“ I have not said what I meant to say — what I must say still, if 
you will let me.” 

“No, please do not say any more. It will only make me more 
vexed with myself.” 

“ Why is it impossible?” he said, abruptly, after a long searching 
glance at her. 

The tears were trembling on her long eyelashes; and in his sight 
they were more precious than diamonds. 

“I — I could not make you happy, Mr. Lewis.” 

“ Let me be the judge of that. If you cannot, no one can.” 

“Perhaps no one can, for your standard is cruelly high. I could 
never reach it.” 

' “ Would you have me believe,” he said, in his low, level voice, 
looking her full in the face as he said it, “ that this life you lead 
here satisfies you ?” 

“ I don’t say it does, but I could not lead yours.” 

“Have I ever spoken of mine?” 

“No, but others have in my hearing. People are more busy 
with your name than you know of, Mr. Lewis. I know that your 
pastime is to go about in the slums ; that when other men go home 
or to their clubs you go to pestilential dens and work like a mis- 
sionary among savages. Don’t interrupt me, please. You cannot 
deny all this, and I have heard, too, that your wealth is no pleasure 
to you — nothing but a burden.” 

“ Not a burden, Miss Merry weather, but a trust. It would be the 
same to you.” 

“ To me a trust is a burden. I don’t know that I love money, 
but I should enjoy it if I had it.” 


CALLED TO ACCOUNT 


37 


“Never tell me that you would not share your good things with 
your fellows. You have not lived among the poor, you don’t know 
how they live ; if you did, you would find your chief pleasure in 
helping them.” 

Pearl shook her head. 

“ Can two walk together except they are agreed ?” she asked, 
rather sadly. 

“ You wrong yourself. You were never meant for the life you 
are leading here. Not for the world would I take you where I go 
myself, but I cannot believe that you would deny me your help 
where you could give it.” 

“ Mr. Lewis, I wish you would believe me when I tell you that 
you will never find your helpmeet in me. I am not worse, perhaps, 
than most others of the vain, weak, selfish women whom you meet 
any day and every day wherever you may go, but I am no better. 
The only sign of grace about me is that I know exactly what I am.” 

“ And I,” he said, slowly and impressively, “ know what you may 
be, will be, if you do yourself justice.” 

“ I have always heard that love is blind. I know it now.” 

“If either of us two is blind it is you, not I. You will never 
persuade me that you are one of the vain, weak, selfish women of 
the earth. Believe me, I have met too many in my life not to know 
the difference.” 

“You deceive yourself because you wish to be deceived.” 

She was nearer the truth than she knew in saying these words, 
under which he winced ever so slightly. 

“ Let it be,” he said, presently, “ that you have lived in carelessness 
hitherto, since you accuse yourself so harshly ; but there is the fut- 
ure, a long future, and you have but a short past. You have all life 
before you.” 

She was silent; his words touched her so deeply that she could 
not find it in her heart to wound him further by telling him that the 
life which lay before her could never be shared with him. 

“ We shall be missed,” she said, presently. “ I think we had bet- 
ter go back to the drawing-room.” 

“If you think so, let us go — but I must see you again, Miss Mer- 
ryweather. This cannot be the end ; there are other things I must 
say to you — I must — ” 

“ Mr. Lewis, if you were wise you would let this be the end. I 
know I am right.” 

“ One word — perhaps I have no business to ask you, but forgive 


38 


THE PRICE OF A PEARL 


me for asking. You have been kinder to me than to any one else 
here, as far as I have seen — I have not deceived myself about that — 
but is there any one else whom I have not seen ?” 

“ There is no one else.” 

He breathed a deep sigh of relief. 

“ You will let me see you to-morrow ?” 

“Mr. Lewis, why will you hurt both yourself and me?” 

“I will not hurt you. I will not say what I have said to-night, 
but there are things about my life that I want you to know. Let 
me have your sympathy, at least ; I won’t ask for your love.” 

She hesitated for a moment. Moving as this scene was to her, it 
was not wholly painful. She saw that the matter was not ended by 
her rejection of his suit, but she knew that it might be ended now 
and forever if she refused him this further interview. 

Her aunt’s words recurred to her, “ Leave him alone in future.” 

It was hard that the decision should rest with her. Why could 
he not be persuaded that she was not what he believed her? She 
did not want to deceive him. 

He saw her hesitation, and again earnestly pleaded that she would 
see him once more before he left Fingall. 

“ If you are wise you will not come back,” she said, gravely. 

“ I may be obliged to come back on the business that brought me 
here, but I will not break my word to you. If you shut your door 
on me I will not try to force it; but open it to-morrow, I beseech 
of you.” 

Pearl sighed and looked wistful as she answered, sadly, 

“ It is not I who shuts the door. Why is it that a man always 
makes an enemy of the woman who cannot marry him ?” 

“ An enemy !” he repeated, quickly, “ when I ask for the smallest 
crumb of your friendship. Will you count me as your friend from 
henceforth ?” 

She had given him the opening, and he was scarcely to be blamed 
for pressing in with a swiftness that almost frightened her. But 
could she hold herself blameless for the consequences? 

Pearl’s conscience, and it was neither an enlightened nor a vigi- 
lant one, pressed that question home on her with provoking perti- 
nacity for hours after she had laid her head on the pillow, and she 
sought in vain to silence it. 


CHAPTER VI 


NEXT MORNING 

“ Too much of the woman in a daughter of our race leads her to forget dan- 
ger : too little of the woman prompts her to defy it.” 

Long before Lady Dalrymple had entered next morning upon 
those mysterious rites of which her long-suffering maid was at 
once the victim and the arch priestess, Pearl was up and dressed, 
her pulses quickened in anticipation of the coming interview be- 
tween herself and Mr. Lewis, her usually pale cheek not flushed in- 
deed, but tinged with a delicate pink that to a practised eye might 
well have betrayed some strong inward excitement. 

The archdeacon, however, very seldom looked at his daughter. 
She bestowed a dutiful salute upon his broad, furrowed brow every 
morning at breakfast, to which he responded by an aimless kiss into 
space, his eyes being all the while fastened on his innumerable let- 
ters. But as the girl had been heard to say herself, with more of 
accuracy than of filial affection or reverence, she might be clothed 
in sackcloth and wear ashes on her head for all the notice that her 
father was likely to take of her except on the very rare occasions 
when his mind was unpreoccupied by his professional duties. 

In like manner Stephen’s appearance, after “ making merry with 
his friends,” which he had done pretty often of late, usually passed 
unobserved by his “ venerable ” parent, though Pearl’s eyes were not 
slow to detect many growing signs of dissipation and excess on the 
boy’s handsome debonnaire features which filled her with secret unea- 
siness. 

This morning in particular she noticed that her brother looked 
singularly unlike a model man of business, and her mind misgave her 
that Mr. Lewis would not take long to repent of having offered a 
berth to Stephen Merry weather in order to prove his deep interest 
in herself. 

“You don’t look very brilliant,” she said, rather gravely, as he 
took his cup of tea from her with a trembling hand that told its own 
story. 


40 


THE PRICE OF A PEARL 


“ I have a beastly headache. Why do they insist on drawing up 
every blessed blind in the room ? The light is enough to put one’s 
eyes out.” 

Pearl quietly rose from her seat and began to pull them down, 
whereat the archdeacon looked round with an exclamation of impa- 
tience. 

“ What’s the matter? I can’t see to read my letters. Why can’t 
you leave the blinds alone, my dear?” 

Stephen himself was scarcely more grateful. 

“ Oh, mercy on us ! What a row you are making, Pearl !” as the 
blinds went up again after the archdeacon’s remonstrance. “Come 
and give me some more tea, there’s a good girl. My head is split- 
ting this morning.” 

“Where did you dine last night?” asked Pearl, though tolerably 
sure beforehand of the answer she was likely to receive. 

“At Mrs. Mandeville’s, of course. You may be sure I wouldn’t 
go out of town for any one else. By-the-way, did that fellow 
What’s-his-name turn up all right at your spread yesterday ?” 

“ Yes, he did ; but it was really rather awkward, Stephen, not 
knowing who he was. Aunt Cecilia only found out his name by 
telling a sort of tarradiddle.” 

“By Jove! I remember it now myself. Isn’t it MacAdam, or 
Mac Something? I know his father has a place in Scotland.” 

“You seem rather vague on the subject, but as it happens his 
name is MacAdam, and his father’s place is called Adamscourt. 
Aunt Cecilia knew all about the family.” 

“ Oh, come, that’s all right. Then she was safe to have been 
civil.” 

“And, moreover,” continued Pearl, rather mockingly, “she found 
out also that he was a friend of Lord Bertie’s.” 

“ To be sure he is. It was at Bertie’s rooms I used to meet him. 
He isn’t half a bad fellow, is he ?” 

“ Not half,” assented Pearl. “ I should say there was no guile 
or malice about him.” 

“ Mind you, I knew who the fellow was, though I couldn’t put a 
name to him. He nursed Bertie through some bad illness, I remem- 
ber, and then he got it himself and nearly died, and then his people 
came to look after him, and his mother took the infection, and was 
dead in a week. There was quite a sensation about it in Oxford at 
the time.” 

“ He told me that he had lost bis mother about two years ago.” 


NEXT MORNING 


41 


“ And rnigbt have told you, if-he liked, that he didn’t get on 
particularly well with his governor — at least, that was the general 
idea at Oxford.” 

u I should have thought he could get on with any one,” said 
Pearl, in some astonishment, for the youth had certainly not im- 
pressed her as being at all a difficult subject. 

“ Oh, I don’t say it was young MacAdam’s fault, but I know the 
other brother was supposed to be the favorite with his father. Ber- 
tie can tell you more about it than I can.” 

“ I very much doubt that Lord Bertie will ever tell me anything 
I want to know on any subject,” said Pearl, somewhat stiffly, where- 
at her brother raised his eyebrows. 

“ I thought you were by way of being friends.” 

“ That is the general idea, I believe, about us ; but I don’t intend 
to count on his friendship, I assure you.” 

“He could hardly pose as a lover, could he?” and Stephen burst 
out laughing at his own suggestion. 

“ It would be a comic spectacle, certainly but, though Pearl 
echoed the laugh, there was something strained and unnatural in her 
merriment. 

“ I suppose the Bat was in attendance last night, as a matter of 
course ?” 

“That’s a very disrespectful way of speaking of your future 
chief.” 

“ Every one calls him the Bat. They say he belongs to his spec- 
tacles.” 

“ All the same, I don’t advise any one to try to take advantage of 
his blindness. I should not like him to see you this morning, for 
instance.” 

“ Why ? what’s the matter with me ?” and Stephen looked a trifle 
sulky as he got up from the breakfast-table. 

“Well, that very loud suit, to begin with. Whose taste is it? 
You might as well be dressed in a draught-board at once.” 

“ It’s a deuced well-made suit, I can tell you.” 

“ It’s not becoming, I assure you, Stephen.” 

“That’s a matter of opinion,” Stephen answered, curtly, from 
which Pearl augured that Mrs. Mandeville was responsible for the 
startling pattern. “I sha’n’t wear it in old Lewis’s office, you may 
be sure of that.” 

“Then I advise you to keep out of his way. He is coming here 
this morning.” 


42 


THE PRICE OF A PEARL 


“ Coming here, is he ? What for ?” 

“ To take your character, perhaps,” said Pearl, rather mischiev- 
ously. 

“ To interview the governor, I suppose. What are you going to 
say to him ?” 

“ Nothing of that sort, for he’s not coming for that purpose.” 

“Then what is he coming for?” 

“ That I shall know when he has come.” 

“ I suppose that’s why you’re got up to the nines this morning.” 
And Stephen’s perplexed gaze travelled up and down his sister’s slim 
figure, resting finally on her flushed face. 

“ I have the same dress that I wore yesterday.” 

“ You look quite different, all the same. I say, Pearl, you might 
do worse than take him. He could curl your hair with bank-notes, 
if half of what people say is true. And Mrs. Mandeville vows that 
he means business.” 

“ I wish she would mind hers,” said Pearl, with dry disapproba- 
tion in her tone which Stephen secretly resented. 

“ Naturally she is interested in yon, being my sister,” he replied, 
loftily. 

“Is she interested in Mr. Mandeville’s sister?” inquired Pearl, well 
aware that Stephen objected to being reminded of the existence of 
such a person as Mr. Mandeville, whom he now proceeded to stig- 
matize very forcibly as a “ beast and a brute.” “ We have only 
Mrs. Mandeville’s authority for saying so,” Pearl observed, coolly. 
“ He, poor man, is not here to defend himself.” 

“You women are always down on each other, and it’s all spite 
and jealousy.” 

“ Jealous !” repeated Pearl. “ I jealous of Mrs. Mandeville ?” 

“ I don’t say you are, but half the women you hear abusing her 
would give their eyes to be as fetching as she is, and you take your 
opinion from them.” 

“ My dear Stephen, I don’t suppose that you will believe me if I 
tell you that I have taken my opinion of Mrs. Mandeville from you, 
and from no one else.” 

“ Well, you know what I think of her.” 

“ I do. I know what she allows you to think, and that’s quite 
enough for me.” 

“ Oh, they’re all mighty proper in her ladyship’s circle, no doubt,” 
sneered Stephen. “ One comfort is, she doesn’t trouble herself over 
what is said of her there.” 


NEXT MORNING 


43 


“ I think it is a pity she doesn’t. A woman in Mrs. Mandeville’s 
very doubtful position can’t afford to be reckless.” 

“ And who put her into the position ?” said Stephen, waxing hot- 
ter as his sister waxed colder. “ Mandeville has practically deserted 
her.” 

“ And so she takes presents from young men in his absence. 
Without being very proper, Stephen, I think I should draw the line 
at that.” 

“Oh, you wait till you’re tried,” he retorted, angrily, and flung 
out of the room with a “ wooden oath ” — in other words, banging the 
door with a violence that resounded all through the house. 

The archdeacon had already left the room, or even he might have 
been startled by the unseemly noise which jarred on every nerve of 
his daughter’s sensitive frame, and caused her to'wince almost as if 
a blow had been dealt her. 

Yet assuredly she had been guiltless of any intention to exasper- 
ate Stephen. She believed honestly that Mrs. Mandeville’s society 
was doing the young man no good, but unfortunately she was not 
possessed of the best recipe for detaching Stephen from it. Any 
attempt to do so invariably ended in some such scene as this, and 
to-day for the first time Pearl began to ask herself, in some perplex- 
ity, could it be her fault ? 

Her discomposure was visible on her face when Mr. Lewis was an- 
nounced, so much so, that he looked at her very fixedly through his 
formidable glasses before accepting her invitation to sit down. 

“ Have I done wrong to come ?” he asked, searchingly. “ If so, 
you must send me away. I won’t sit down.” 

“ Why should I send you away, Mr. Lewis, unless you wish to 
go?” 

“ What I wish is of no consequence, but — you must forgive me 
for saying so — you look vexed this morning. Am I the cause?” 

“ No, indeed !” she answered, warmly. “ You have a better right 
to be vexed than I have.” 

“ But you do not deny that you are vexed.” And again those ter- 
rible lenses were turned full upon her. 

“ I thought you were so near-sighted, Mr. Lewis ?” 

“Yes. I can only see what is under my eyes — my glasses, I 
mean, for the one would be of no use without the other.” 

“ Do me a favor, then,” she said, with her winning smile, “ and 
take them off.” 

He shook his head. 


44 


THE PRICE OF A PEARL 


“That is too much to ask of me, Miss Merry weather. My friends 
tell me I should have to set up a dog if my glasses were taken away 
from me, and besides — my time here is short. Do not grudge me 
the little I have left.” 

“Just now,” she observed, coquettishly, “you wanted to make it 
shorter.” 

“ Because I feared you had repented your promise last night.” 

“I think it was you who made a promise, and I am going to re- 
mind you of it.” 

He was breathless with a kind of blissful amazement when she 
said these words, and for some moments his trembling tongue could 
not find utterance. 

“ What,” he stammered — “ what can I do?” 

Would his secretary have recognized him at that moment, or any 
of the gray-headed city magnates whom he had interviewed at his 
hotel before coming here? Was it possible that a mere girl like 
this had power to turn him hot and cold in the same breath, just by 
the turn of her head, the tone of her voice, the charm of her smile ? 

Yes, it was possible; but the possibility in the case of a grave 
middle-aged lover has always some tragical element in it. The ef- 
fect is out of all due proportion to the cause. 

Pearl herself was startled at the transformation of the man’s whole 
face and bearing. 

“ Perhaps I ought not to remind you,” she said, sitting down her- 
self, and pointing him to a chair with a kind of graceful diffidence 
far more enslaving than any assumption of sovereignty. “ Some 
people might blame me for taking you at your word, but — I think 
I may trust you, Mr. Lewis.” 

“ Thank you,” he said, simply, “ I hope you will.” 

“ You have been very kind about my brother. I want you to be 
kind to him, if you will — to be a friend to him, if you can.” 

He left the chair she had indicated to him, and took one a little 
nearer to herself. There was a moment’s significant silence before 
he answered, rather wistfully : 

“ Have you nothing harder than that to ask me ?” 

“ Mr. Lewis, I don’t know that it will be very easy. I want to 
ask you to be patient with my brother — I don’t mean, of course, to 
show him partiality, but at first to overlook what might perhaps 
displease you in a subordinate. I don’t know exactly how to make 
my meaning clear without giving you a false impression of Stephen, 
and yet — ” 


NEXT MORNING 


45 


“I understand,” he said, quietly. “ You are anxious about your 
brother.” 

“ Perhaps I am foolish to be anxious, but there is no one else to 
care. My aunt and he do not get on. She is barely civil to him, 
and I am so much with her that I cannot be a great deal with him, 
and so he goes to his friends, who are not always the best he could 
choose.” 

“ This is not a good place, I take it, for a young man who has 
nothing particular to do?” 

“ Not at all good. I suppose no military station ever is.” 

“ And your father,” said Lewis, after a moment or two of awk- 
ward silence — “ is he anxious too ?” 

“ My father is so busy that many things escape him. I don’t 
mean that Stephen deceives him ; but it is just this, Mr. Lewis : there 
is no one to guide my brother, and yet he is so easily led. Have I 
set you against him by telling you this ? I have been so afraid some- 
times that you would be a little relentless if any one failed to come 
up to your standard of perfection.” 

“ Relentless !” he repeated, and his tone was somewhat distressed ; 
“ why should you call me relentless? What have I said or done to 
give you such an idea of me?” 

“ I don’t know why I should have thought so ; you would be just, 
I know. I am sure you would always be just.” 

“ But not merciful — is that what you meant to say ?” he asked 
her, seeing that she broke off abruptly. 

“ I have no right to say so. Indeed, you have given me no right.” 
And she, in her turn, looked distressed at the sudden change which 
had come over him since she had given utterance to her secret mis- 
givings. 

He got up from his seat and walked over to the window, where 
he stood looking out for some moments in dead silence. Some 
chord had been touched by her inadvertent hand — a painful one, 
to judge by the expression of his face, when he turned at last 
and found her standing, pale and perplexed, in the middle of the 
room. 

“ Is that why you said ‘ no ’ to me last night?” 

His lips trembled slightly as they put this searching question. 
There were lines of pain upon the square, resolute face. 

“ I am afraid it is you who are vexed now,” Pearl said, a little 
uneasily. 

She was quite unprepared for this turning of the tables. 


46 


THE PRICE OF A PEARL 


He was not to be diverted, however, by her evasive answer, and 
again asked her: 

“ Is that why you said ‘ no ’ last night ?” 

“ Not exactly, but — I told you that you did not know me, that 
you thought me far better than I was.” 

“ You told me so. Yes.” 

“ I thought, I still think, you would not easily forgive me if you 
found out that I was different.” 

Pearl was surprised at the effort it cost her to say this, yet there 
was no resentment in the man’s face as he stood looking at her, only 
an indescribable hunger that went to her heart. 

lie might be rich and prosperous and powerful, but assured- 
ly he was not happy. Yet if he was not, who had the right 
to be so? for she needed no outside opinion to convince her 
that, judged even by a high standard, Mr. Lewis was a righteous 
man. 

The shiver with which he presently averted his eyes communi- 
cated itself to her. She felt herself in the presence of an emotion 
that awed no less than it disturbed her. 

“ You are going?” she said, inquiringly, seeing that he was look- 
ing about him vaguely for his hat. 

“ I — yes — I think I had better go now. You may be quite hap- 
py about your brother, Miss Merryweather. I will do all I can for 
him. Of course you will understand that in the office I can make 
no difference.” 

“ Of course, I perfectly understand that, but — you did not come 
here to talk of Stephen, Mr. Lewis?” 

“ No. I came to talk of myself — a bad thing to do, Miss Merry- 
weather, so I have changed my mind about doing it.” 

He held out his hand as he spoke. His face had settled back into 
the old lines of impenetrable gravity. 

“ I have made you doubt my sympathy.” 

There was real compunction in Pearl’s voice as well as disappoint- 
ment. She did not like to feel that he was slipping away from her. 
She was less disposed than ever this morning, now that she had 
caught a glimpse of the real man, to follow her aunt’s counsel and 
“ leave him alone in future.” 

He hesitated for a moment, and the wistful look came back into 
his eyes. 

“ Perhaps,” he said, a little unsteadily, “ I may ask you for it 
again some day.” 


NEXT MORNING 


47 


After he was gone, she remembered what he had declared the 
night before. 

“ This cannot be the end.” 

He had not given her up yet. Whether in the near or in the far 
distance the end was still hidden from her, and she knew that it was 
her own doing. 


CHAPTER VII 


THE HEAD OF THE HOUSE 

“ Perhaps the old monks were right when they tried to root love out ; perhaps 
the poets are right when they try to water it.” 

At about five o’clock in the afternoon of the next day, Mr. Lewis, 
having done the work of two men ever since the early morning, at- 
tended several committee meetings, overhauled large arrears of cor- 
respondence, and signed innumerable papers, threw himself at last 
into his brougham and was driven to the Charing Cross terminus, 
just in time to catch the express down to St. Cuthbert’s. 

To the guard of this train he was evidently well known, for the 
man’s stiff official countenance relaxed visibly as he unlocked the 
coupe. 

“I began to think you were never coming this way again, sir. 
The old gentleman will be looking out for you at St. Cuthbert’s.” 

“ Well, I hope so, Frazer. I sent him a telegram this morning, 
but I hardly hoped to get away so soon.” 

The guard shook his head. 

“You hadn’t ought to hurry, sir, the way you do. It ’ll come 
against you one of these days. You don’t look the thing now, sir, 
either, if you’ll excuse my saying so.” 

“Oh, I’m all right,” replied Lewis, with a nod and smile, which 
revealed the existence of a perfect understanding between himself 
and this gray-headed railway servant, who, for the rest, had known 
him since his boyhood, and appreciated him as perhaps few of his 
equals did. 

At each of the three halts on the down journey he came to the 
door of the coupe for a few moments’ chat, and each time he noticed 
with surprise that Mr. Lewis, instead of being absorbed in his busi- 
ness papers, as was his wont on these occasions, was leaning back in 
his seat with folded arms, his travelling-cap pulled well down over 
his forehead, and his eyes closed even to the beauties of the lovely 
spring evening. 


THE HEAD OF THE HOUSE 


49 


Each time, too, when addressed by the guard, he seemed to pull 
himself together with a kind of effort, as though his thoughts had 
gone on a long journey, and could only be recalled with some difficulty. 

And in truth he was giving them full rein for the first time since 
he had said good-bye to Pearl Merry weather in the forenoon of yes- 
terday. Certainly the consciousness of his feeling for her had under- 
lain everything that had befallen him or that he had done since, but 
till now he had not had one moment’s leisure in which to brood upon 
it, and to realize how completely it had taken hold of him. Whether 
he was most happy or most miserable he would have found it hard 
to say, but there was sufficient evidence of some conflict of widely 
different emotions on his worn face to justify the guard’s unfavor- 
able opinion of his looks. 

The sun was setting when the train drew up beside the platform 
of a small country station outside the fashionable watering-place of 
St. Cuthbert’s-on-the-Sea, whose large and busy terminus lay about 
a mile farther up the line. An old gentleman with very white hair 
and very thick black eyebrows came eagerly forward when Lewis put 
his head out of the carriage window. The guard hastened up at the 
same moment, and unlocked the door of the coupe with a broad grin 
of sympathy. 

“ Well, lad !” and the old gentleman’s face beamed, and his hands 
were tremulous with delight when Lewis jumped out and stood be- 
side him on the platform. 

“ Well, I got away, after all. Just caught the train in the nick 
of time. Look out for me next Friday, Frazer, at the same hour, 
and keep the coupe for me, unless indeed a young couple should hap- 
pen to want it.” 

“A pair of fools, you mean,” interrupted his uncle. “ God defend 
me from a newly married pair on their honeymoon.” 

Old Mr. Lewis had one mania with which every one who ever ap- 
proached him was sooner or later intimately acquainted. lie could 
not endure even the mention of marriage. It was, in his eyes, an un- 
mitigated evil ; all the greater because, as he was forced to admit, in 
the existing state of society it was a necessary one. 

So well did the guard know this that he permitted himself to wink 
at the younger Lewis when the old gentleman gave utterance to his 
misanthropic sentiments. 

“ I am always hoping, sir,” he said, with the respectful freedom of 
an old retainer, “that I may lock up Mr. Bartholomew one of these 
days with a nice young lady in this here coupy.” 

4 


50 


THE PRICE OF A PEARL 


“Mr. Bartholomew knows when he’s well off,” retorted Uncle 
Christopher, in a tone of crusty benevolence, “ and you’re an old 
fool,” he added, putting something into the guard’s hand calculated 
to rob his words of any lurking asperity. “ Now, Bat, my boy, come 
along. The horses are as fresh as ever they can be. They nearly 
tugged my arms off coming here.” 

Off they went accordingly to the neat little phaeton in waiting 
outside the station, the old man leaning on the arm of his nephew 
with an air of innocent pride and satisfaction inexpressibly touching 
to its object. 

“How have you been, Uncle Kit,” he said, affectionately, “and 
how is everything getting on ?” 

“ Oh, famously, lad, famously. They’ve made quite a stride with 
the hospital. You’ll be surprised at all that’s been done to it since 
you were here last. You’d better take the reins; my old arms are 
aching, and Lassie’s so skittish there’s no holding her.” 

“ What perfect weather it has been ! I never remember such a 
May.” And a curious dreamy expression flitted across the face of the 
younger man as he turned the horses’ heads in the direction of their 
stables. 

He almost felt like a boy this evening — ardent, romantic, passion- 
ate ; and a few hours back he had been grinding in the mill like any 
ordinary mortal. The air was redolent with the delicious fragrant 
odor from the neighboring pine forests, and the sea lay calm and 
peaceful beneath the pale glow left behind by the gorgeous sunset. 
“ What is she doing?” he asked himself, “ and has she a thought to 
spare to me, or am I already out of mind as out of sight ?” 

His uncle found him unusually silent in the course of that home- 
ward drive, and glanced up more than once in mute inquiry at the 
grave profile with its square jaw and set lips that always conveyed 
an expression of some latent sternness in the character. 

“What kept you, Bat?” he said, abruptly, as they were turning 
into the short but steep approach that led up to his cosey little dwell- 
ing-place. 

That a rich man should be contented with so small a house was a 
matter of ceaseless astonishment to the good people at St. Cuthbert’s, 
who could not understand that to a certain order of jnind the dis- 
play of wealth for its own sake is neither a satisfaction nor a com- 
fort. 

Uncle and nephew were at least thoroughly of one mind wit^i re- 
gard to the responsibilities entailed on them by their vast phrases- 


THE HEAD OF THE HOUSE 


51 


sions, and neither of them could see any necessity for giving up a 
comfortable cottage because he was able to afford a palace. In the 
meantime, a beautiful church on the hill, and a huge hospital, now 
in process of building in the heart of the town, accounted for a 
good deal of their expenditure. 

“What kept me?” repeated Lewis, slowly, as he walked the 
horses up the steep incline, and looked about him to cover his slight 
embarrassment at the directness of the question. “ At Fingall ? 
Oh, well, it was rather a long business from first to last. I don’t 
know but what I may have to go back in three weeks or so.” 

“ I never kuew you take such a time over any business before. 
It is nearly a month since you’ve been here.” 

“ Why, yes, I suppose it must be. There wasn’t a sign of a leaf 
when I last came down.” 

“And have you been all that time at Fingall?” pursued Uncle 
Christopher, whose eyes looked unusually keen and searching be- 
neath their shaggy black brows. 

It was curious what a character these imparted to a face which 
without them might have been almost weakly benevolent. 

“Yes; I’ll tell you about it after dinner,” replied his nephew, 
quietly, bringing the horses to a stand-still at the same moment in 
front of the quaint, gable-ended house which represented home to 
him, although he could seldom spend more than a couple of nights 
together beneath its roof. 

Uncle Christopher’s face as he followed him into the garden was 
slightly overcast. He felt rather than knew that there was some- 
thing amiss with Bat, though he was very far from guessing the real 
state of the case. It had always been his boast, hitherto, that his 
nephew, like himself, knew when he was well off, and Lewis, being 
aware of this, was anxious to postpone the evil moment for un- 
deceiving him as long as possible. 

“ How wonderfully everything has come on,” he remarked, cheer- 
fully. “ Let us take the round, if you are up to it.” 

“ By all means. I told them not to send up the dinner till half- 
past seven, so we have plenty of time.” 

The old man was proud of his garden, and liked it to be appreci- 
ated. It was so skilfully laid out in a series of grass terraces as to 
give the impression of being at least three times its real size, and no 
stranger could have pronounced where its limits ended and where 
those of St. Cuthbert’s pleasure-ground began. 

The sea lay beyond, the faint ripple of its waves on the pebbly 


52 


THE PRICE OF A PEARL 


beach being just audible in the stillness of the evening air. On the 
other side of the house the land shelved upward in a beautifully 
planted bank, which served as a shelter from the north wind in win- 
ter, and threw a cooling shade in summer upon the well-kept lawn. 

“ It’s good after London, isn’t it?” suggested Uncle Christopher, 
when they had made their round and were preparing to go in to 
lamplight and closed windows. 

“Very good ; but I can’t complain of not having had my share of 
greenery this year. You should see Fingall ; it’s a wonderful city.” 

“ So I’ve heard,” said Uncle Christopher, shortly. 

He was conscious of a certain jealousy of a place that seemed to 
claim so much of his nephew’s time and attention. 

“ I want you to come there next month in the barge. It would 
be a charming trip ; the river scenery is perfect.” 

“ But the river itself is pestilential,” interrupted the old gentle- 
man, who was in a contradictory mood this evening. 

“Only down at the quays. We needn’t go near them. I can 
show you the map after dinner. I have traced the whole route.” 

“ Hem ! we shall see. Come in now, lad. You must be ready for 
your dinner — at least, I’m ready, if you’re not.” 

Nevertheless, when the dinner was served, Uncle Christopher 
seemed to have lost his appetite, and frequently threw down his knife 
and fork and pushed away his plate with a great sigh, indicative of 
some weight upon his mind which could not find any other relief. 

Every now and then his eyes would wander to a large oil-paintiug 
that hung over the mantel-piece, representing an exquisitely fair girl 
in white muslin, with a huge, old-fashioned straw hat dangling from 
her hand, and a brown spaniel crouching at her feet. It was not a 
work of art by any means, but the painter had so faithfully caught 
the expression of the face and so skilfully fixed it on the canvas 
that an artist friend of Lewis, having sat opposite the picture for 
one week, had gone home and painted one himself which had created 
quite a sensation when it was exhibited a year later at the Academy, 
under the title of “ A Broken Reed.” Whether Lewis recognized 
the source of his friend’s inspiration no one could say, and the sub- 
ject was not one which any one would have dared to approach with 
him, but the few who knew anything of his past history were rather 
struck by the artistic insight displayed in the painter’s choice of 
title. His own place at his uncle’s table, whether accidentally or of 
set purpose, was always with his back to the picture, and no one 
had ever seen him look at it. 


THE HEAD OF THE HOUSE 


53 


Uncle Christopher, however, could not help looking at it to- 
night, for some reason which he would have found it hard to ex- 
plain, but which was certainly connected with his nephew. Lewis, 
for his part, endeavored to keep up the conversation, which had a 
tendency to languish in the presence of the two neat maid-servants, 
notwithstanding the fact that these, ‘in accordance with the old 
gentleman’s latest whim, were both of them deaf-and-dumb. The 
clack of women’s voices, he was wont to declare, would have ended 
by driving him mad, unless he had adopted this somewhat eccentric 
device for securing a respite from it. 

“ I have filled up the vacant desk at the bank,” said his nephew, 
in one of those desperate pauses that will occur at times between 
two people when they are both more or less preoccupied. 

“ Yes ? to your satisfaction ?” 

“ It’s an experiment. It remains to be seen how it will answer. 
The young fellow is rather older than I could wish, but I dare say 
that won’t signify.” 

“Oh!” said Uncle Christopher, dryly. And then he added, with 
peculiar emphasis, “he has a sister, I presume?” 

His nephew gave an almost imperceptible start, and replied, 
quietly : 

“Yes; he has.” 

“ I thought so.” And after this the silence was appalling until 
the dessert was placed on the table, and the two maids left the 
room. 

Then Uncle Christopher got up and began to pace up and down, 
having first pushed a box of cigars across the table without a glance 
at his nephew. 

“ So it’s a woman ?” he said at last, turning sharply round and 
flinging the words over his shoulder. 

Lewis got up in his turn, walked over to the mantel-piece, and 
stood for a few moments in silence, with his back to the fire. 

“ Is it so very extraordinary,” he asked, in a tone of mild for- 
bearance, “ that it should be a woman ?” 

“It’s not what I should ever have expected from you. I gave 
you credit for greater sense,” was his uncle’s surly reply, accom- 
panied by a meaning glance at the picture which Lewis chose to 
ignore. 

“Look here, Uncle Kit,” he said, quietly, “if we had been on 
different terms from what, thank God ! we are, and always will be, 
I should have said nothing of this matter to you until it was settled 


54 


TIIE PRICE OF A PEARL 


one way or the other, which it isn’t at present. But I have never 
kept a secret from you yet, and 1 don’t know why I should begin 
now, especially about anything that so nearly concerns us both as 
my marriage.” 

The result of this speech was to make old Mr. Lewis look rather 
ashamed of himself, and he sat down with something like a groan 
on the seat that his nephew had vacated. 

“Bat,” he said, looking up at him with wistful eyes, and sorrow- 
fully shaking his head, “ what possesses you?” 

But the question was not an easy one to answer. The man to 
whom it was put knew well enough that he was possessed — yes, that 
was the very word for what he felt, but whether for his weal or for 
his woe he could not tell. 

Presently the old man went on again, his hands trembling — as 
they always did when his emotions were stirred — and his voice 
shaking. 

“Once bitten, twice shy. You had a lesson once, my boy. Have 
you forgotten it?” 

“ No,” said the other, tersely. “ I have not forgotten anything. 
I wish I could.” 

“And yet you are willing to take the risk again ?” 

Lewis nodded silently. He would not trust himself to speak. 

The old man continued to regard him with mournful eyes. 

“Tell me everything,” he said, rousing himself presently with a 
painful effort. “ I saw you were moonstruck when you got out of 
the train, but I didn’t expect this — not till you blurted out about 
your new clerk at dinner.” 

“You jumped to conclusions quickly enough then,” Lewis ob- 
served, with a slight smile. 

“ I never knew you break your rule before. That was the work 
of a woman.” 

It would be impossible to convey the withering scorn with which 
Uncle Christopher pronounced that last word. 

“ Yes,” said Lewis, quietly, “ it was.” 

“ That maddens me 1” exclaimed the old man, starting up from 
his seat, and resuming his angry tramping up and down the room. 

“ I see that it does, but it’s a pity that it should. Be reasonable, 
like a dear old fellow, and come back here. I can’t talk when you’re 
stamping up and down like a caged beast.” 

“Upon my word, you’re very civil, sir !” 

But Uncle Christopher could not long hold out against his 


THE HEAD OF THE HOUSE 


55 


nephew’s unvarying evenness of temper, and obediently sat down 
as he had been desired. 

“ There was no principle involved in my rule at any time,” Lewis 
proceeded to explain, gently. “ I made it to suit my own con- 
venience — ” 

“ But you broke it to suit hers.” 

“ No ; I broke it to relieve her from anxiety and to give her 
pleasure. I hope I have done both.” 

“ Then I suppose the fellow is a scamp !” said Uncle Christopher, 
again jumping to conclusions with provoking rapidity. 

“ Not so much a scamp as a scapegrace, I fancy ; but scapegraces 
can be reformed.” 

“ I wish you joy of him and her too. Good heavens ! has it 
come to this, that you have engaged a man to serve the bank whom 
you know to be unfit for the post because, forsooth ! his sister’s 
beaux yeux have dazzled you ? Don’t interrupt me, sir ! That’s 
the plain English of it, and I say more’s the pity. No good will 
come of it.” 

Lewis was silent. To argue with his uncle in his present mood 
was worse than useless, but forbearance had become second nature 
with him, and it never failed sooner or later to bring the old gentle- 
man to reason. On the present occasion it was later rather than 
sooner, for perceiving that he could not provoke a retort to his last 
speech, and being so thoroughly ashamed of having made it that he 
would have been only too thankful if Bat had turned and rent him, 
Mr. Lewis senior presently got up and walked out of the room, slam- 
ming the door behind him. 

His movements were audible for some time afterwards, during 
which his nephew remained in the dining-room, and gave himself up 
to the soothing influence of the gentle “ weed.” 

“I wish he wouldn’t take it so hard, dear old fellow,” he reflected, 
rather dejectedly, for this scene had helped to make him aware of 
his own exceeding weariness both of body and mind — “ and it’s 
only the idea either, for if he knew her — ” 

Oh, what a world of blissful possibilities lay behind that “ if ” ! 
His heart thrilled, his eyes filled at the bare thought. And all this 
ecstasy, this dream of happiness that exalted him as far above the 
level of his every-day life as heaven is above earth, was, as his uncle 
had remarked with such intensity of bitterness, the work of a wom- 
an. It is a miracle which happens often enough, but none the less the 
woman may plead with perfect justice that she is not responsible for it. 


56 


THE PRICE OF A PEARL 


The terms on which these two men had lived together for the last 
twenty years were not such as to make the younger insist on an 
apology when the elder had lost his temper ; and accordingly, after 
about half an hour had elapsed, and the angry tread of old Lewis’s 
creaking boots had given place to perfect silence, his nephew got up 
with a gentle smile, threw away the end of his cigar, and knocked 
at the door of the study. 

Two or three times in his boyhood he had gone into that room to 
receive a flogging, and the droll memory of his sensations on these 
occasions obtruded itself now with the curious incongruity that 
plays so large a part in all human affairs, and brings the ridiculous 
into such perilously close proximity with the sublime. 

Old Mr. Lewis was seated at his large magisterial table, engaged 
apparently in rapt contemplation of two or three cases of dazzling 
jewels spread out before him. 

“ Bat, my boy,” he said, humbly, “ your mother wore these at her 
wedding, and I’ve been thinking your wife ought to have them.” 

Lewis took up one of the cases and looked at its contents, at the 
sight of which a touched expression came into his eyes. 

“Pearls,” he murmured. “That would be fitting for her.” 

THen he put it down and said, gently : 

“ Perhaps I may never have one.” 

“ But you told me — ” began his uncle, wistfully. 

“ That I wanted a wife. Yes ; but my suit has not prospered so far.” 

“What!” exclaimed the old man, incredulously. “She has re- 
fused you. Bat ?” 

“Even so, Uncle Kit. Does that amaze you? It does not sur- 
prise me.” But the man bit his lip notwithstanding at the memory 
of that bitter moment. 

“ What does she want, in the name of Heaven ?” 

“ Perhaps a younger lover, or one who could do his wooing bet- 
ter than I can do mine. She does not want my money — I can set 
your mind at ease on that point.” 

“Heaven help us all!” ejaculated Uncle Kit. “I thought you 
had only to speak.” 

“ I mean to speak again. I can’t give up yet, but so far — well, 
I’ve failed.” 

“ It’s a queer world,” said old Lewis, with suppressed bitterness, 
“and women are damned fools. The man who respects their sex 
and respects himself and tries to live cleanly has no chance with 
them. They’d rather have a rake — they would, the best of them.” 


THE HEAD OF THE HOUSE 


57 


“ Perhaps,” suggested the other, temperately, “ the rake under- 
stands them better.” 

“ You don’t understand them. You never did. Either a woman 
is a saint and an angel in your eyes, or else she has no existence for 
you at all. When other young fellows would have been sowing 
their wild oats, you were on your knees before that poor girl whose 
picture is in the next room, and now, when most men have got past 
that sort of thing, you’re hot to begin it all over again.” 

“ I have been alone for many years,” his nephew answered, in a 
low voice. 

“ Yes, and you’ll be alone to your life’s end. Men like you are 
born odd. When were you ever so much alone as when she was 
with you?” 

“ There’s another side to that matter. My failure was at least as 
great as hers. I think you forget that.” 

“I don’t admit it. You had every excuse, and the fault was mine 
if there was a fault.” 

“ No, sir, that won’t do ; I can’t screen myself behind you or any 
one else. The fact stares me in the face that the one woman I ever 
had to do with I made to the full as miserable as she made me.” 

“ No one but yourself would say so.” 

“ No one but myself knows. Put these by, sir, till they’re wanted. 
Perhaps they never will be.” 

Uncle Christopher locked them up with trembling hands, and 
then turned to his nephew. 

“ Lad,” he said, solemnly, “ I pray the Lord to give you your 
heart’s desire. I was wrong to speak as I did of His own ordinance, 
but my soul is vexed to see what men make of it.” 

“ Well,” said the other, in a voice choked by the intensity of his 
emotion, “ I pray that He may deny me altogether rather than let 
me fail again.” 


CHAPTER VIII 


UNDER FOUR EYES 

“He was slow at the subtle analysis whose final result is frequently to rob 
the simple virtues and affections of life of their value.” 

In spite of young MacAdam’s avowed unfamiliarity with polite 
society, he was so far versed in the laws of etiquette as to present 
himself at Lady Dairy m pie’s house a couple of days after her enter- 
tainment, for the purpose of paying what is called across the channel 
a “ visite de digestion .” He found his hostess as he had left her, 
the centre of an adulating crowd. It happened to be her weekly 
reception day, and the front drawing-room was accordingly largely 
taken up by various middle-aged matrons whom the young man 
irreverently classified in his own mind as “ a lot of horrid old tab- 
bies.” 

In the other room he heard, or fancied that he heard, the sound 
of Pearl’s mocking but musical laugh amid the unmusical clatter of 
cups and saucers, and Lady Dalrymple, perceiving that his eyes 
strayed in that direction, set him free after a few moments to go in 
search of the evident attraction. Two or three young ladies, to 
whom he had been introduced at the soiree , would fain have stopped 
him on the way, but he was not to be delayed longer than the 
barest politeness required, and pressed on quietly till he reached the 
large silver tea-urn, behind which sat Pearl, hemmed in by au attend- 
ant crowd of admiring satellites. 

She nodded and smiled brightly when Hector MacAdam made his 
appearance outside the charmed circle. 

“ You shall have a hand in a minute when I have finished pouring 
out this tea. Have you seen Stephen ? He was going to call on 
you this afternoon.” 

“ He hadn’t turned up when I left home. How are you after the 
other night? Not too tired, I hope?” 

“ It would not do for me to be tired quite so easily. I am afraid 
you must think that I lead a very primitive life.” 


UNDER FOUR EYES 


59 


“ You seemed to have a lot to do that night,” he said, apologet- 
ically, “ and there were so many people.” 

“Oh! one gets used, I believe, even to the treadmill — doesn’t 
one, Mr. Watson ?” and Pearl appealed to the flabby youth at her 
side, whom Hector recognized as heir-apparent to the newly created 
barony of Lowick. 

Limp and bored-looking as he was, he had an immense idea of 
his own importance, and was endeavoring at the present moment to 
screw a glass into his right eye, through which to survey the new 
arrival with exactly the right degree of insolence proper to an 
“honorable.” 

Unfortunately, however, Pearl’s appeal caused the glass to have 
an ignominious tumble, and the young man looked discomfited as 
he made a somewhat ungraceful and undignified grab at it, very 
nearly upsetting his cup and saucer in doing so. 

“ Beg pardon. Yes, I suppose one does get used to everything,” 
said the flabby youth confusedly, bestowing at the same time a 
stony stare on Hector, to whom Pearl hastened rather mischievously 
to introduce him as the “ future M.P. for the city of Fingall.” 

“I say! Miss Merry weather !” 

This in a tone of exhausted remonstrance, while the Honorable 
John jerked an almost imperceptible nod in the direction of Hector 
Mac Adam. 

“ I understood Lord Lowick to say so ; at the next election, of 
course. In fact, I imagined that you were studying the blue-books 
already,” observed Pearl, in her most dulcet accents. 

“Awful bore the whole thing will be,” drawled the future Lord 
Lowick. “ Fancy having to canvass for votes down on the quays !” 

His grandfather had run about there barefoot, if report was to be 
believed ; but, of course, Johnny Watson could not be expected to 
remember the circumstance, although his own airs and graces were 
such as to make it impossible for any one else ever to forget it. 

“ Oh, of course, we will undertake the quays,” Pearl said, in a gentle 
tone of reassurance, which moved several of the by-standers to a smile. 

Hector looked puzzled. There was more in this conversation 
than met either his eye or his ear, else why should the budding M.P. 
look so supremely uncomfortable, and glare around him in impotent 
displeasure when Pearl volunteered her services ? 

“Is there likely to be an election soon?” some one inquired 
rather aimlessly. 

“ It can hardly be too soon to please Aunt Cecilia,” replied Pearl, 


60 


THE PRICE OF A PEARL 


with her little mocking laugh. “You see,” she added, turning to 
Hector, “ Mr. Watson represents the right cause.” 

“Yes?” said Hector, with a polite glance of amused inquiry at 
the flabby youth, who scarcely gave the impression of being a very 
redoubtable champion in any cause, whether good or bad. 

“ Tory of the Tories,” pursued Pearl, relentlessly. “ Isn’t that 
so, Mr. Watson ?” 

“The whole thing is a nuisance, I think,” opined the future 
legislator 

“ Ah, well, you will have less trouble in the Upper House, unless 
indeed it is done away with altogether; and what would poor 
Johnny do then, poor thing?” 

But Johnny affected deafness to this last thrust from his fair 
adversary, and having now succeeded in fixing his glass, at least 
temporarily, he beat a judicious retreat into the front drawing- 
room. 

“ I thought that would send him away,” said Pearl, composedly, 
getting up from the table as she spoke, and moving to the window, 
where Hector promptly followed her. It looked out on the green- 
houses and the fernery, and beyond these stretched a fair-sized 
garden, ending in a croquet lawn. 

“ May we go out there ?” he hazarded, after a brief glance at the 
gay borders and shady walks. “ It looks so cool and — ” 

“ Inviting,” supplemented Pearl. “ It certainly does, but all the 
same I don’t think we may go.” And she looked deprecatingly 
across her shoulder at the numerous youths and maidens scattered 
in little helpless groups about the room. 

“For a few minutes,” he pleaded. “You promised to show me 
the fernery.” 

“ So I did. I perceive you have a good memory. Well, let me 
see. Just open that door to your left.” 

“ I don’t see any door either to the left or right,” replied Hector, 
somewhat mystified at this injunction. 

“Oh, I forgot. You are not initiated yet into the ways of the 
house. Look ! this is the means by which I make my escape from 
the Goths and Vandals.” 

She touched a spring in the wall, and one of the panels opened, 
disclosing to view a tiny breakneck staircase leading to the recess, 
which he remembered to have noticed on his way up from the 
dining-room. 

The panel itself was so thickly hung with old engravings and 


UNDER FOUR EYES 


61 


antique miniatures that it could not possibly have been mistaken 
for a door. 

Having opened it, Pearl stood for a moment or two irresolute, 
and then summoned Miss Seaford, whose faded countenance was 
expressive of some mild surprise when Hector politely shook hands 
with her. 

“ I think you might get up a double game of croquet,” said Pearl, 
carelessly. “ It is too fine to remain in-doors.” 

“ Oh, certainly. Are you going to play, Miss Merry weather ?” 

“No, unless Mr. MacAdam insists on it, which I hope he won’t. 
Now please arrange that for me, and set the game going, and I 
shall bless you.” 

She moved off as she spoke, with a little nod compounded of 
mischief and defiance, and the next moment she and Hector were 
safely landed at the foot of the little staircase. 

“ Miss Seaford will be your friend for life,” she said, leading the 
way into the fernery, forgetful apparently that Mr. Lewis’s ghost 
walked there, and might possibly object to being laid. 

“ Why, I only said ‘How do you do?’ ” replied Hector, in a tone 
of astonishment. 

“ I know ; but very few people here do as much. To be sure, I’m 
not always very nice to her myself, as you will discover if you stay 
long enough.” 

“ I suppose she was your governess once ?” said Hector, desirous, 
as it would seem, of finding some adequate reason for the girl’s play- 
ful admission. 

“ My governess ! Oh, no ! that infliction was mercifully spared to 
both of us. She is Lady Dalrymple’s companion and my dragon. 
She will be sent in here presently to see what I am doing.” 

Hector’s exclamation of dismay was sincere enough to be flat- 
tering. 

“ Yes ; that is the system of espionage under which I have been 
brought up all my life. And then people wonder that I should be 
rather naughty sometimes. The wonder to me is that I am so good.” 

“ I don’t think you can be very bad,” said the young man, look- 
ing at her with that open, yet respectful, admiration which was 
never yet displeasing to any woman, whatever her age or condition 
or principles. This woman was no exception to the rule. She 
looked very pretty this evening, with the slanting rays of the sun 
glinting on her fair hair, and lighting up the clear whiteness of her 
skin. 


62 


THE PRICE OF A PEARL 


With such a complexion she could wear what colors she pleased, 
and, as a matter of fact, did often appear in sombre tints that would 
have made a brunette look dirty and an ordinary blonde sallow. 
Such a sober gown she wore to-day, relieved only by a crimson pas- 
sion-flower with its accompanying foliage. It was very simple, 
though the cut was perfect, and no one but herself could have vent- 
ured to wear it with impunity. 

“ Was I very naughty to Johnny Watson ?” she asked, looking up 
at him with a winning smile, as they strolled along. “You looked 
so grave when I teased him.” 

The young man hesitated, and his unruly blood mounted into his 
face. 

“ He is an awful ass, certainly, but — ” 

“ But I ought not to have made him seem a worse one ? So my 
conscience has been telling me, and now you say so, too. If you 
take part against me with my conscience, Mr. MacAdam, I shall re- 
gard you as an enemy.” 

Nevertheless, the expression of her eyes as she turned them full 
upon him was scarcely hostile, though it might very possibly be 
dangerous. 

It was at that precise moment that Mr. Lewis, driving home with 
his uncle in the cool of the evening, was asking himself with loving 
solicitude what she was doing. 

“One’s conscience is usually supposed to be one’s best friend, 
isn’t it?” Hector said, significantly. 

“ Only when it is a very good one, and mine is never that. Are 
you on good terms with yours ?” 

“ Well, that’s a difficult question to answer; because, if I say yes, 
you will set me down very reasonably as an intolerable prig, and if I 
say no, you will think me a worse sinner than I am.” 

“ I don’t think your sky is absolutely unclouded,” said the girl, 
with a searching glance in her curious green eyes that made her look 
like a sibyl. 

“ Why do you say that ?” he asked her, a little uneasily. 

“ I won’t say it if you don’t like. Let us talk of something else. 
Are you going to make any stay here ?” 

“Yes, I think so; but, Miss Merry weather, will you tell me why 
you said that — about my sky not being unclouded ? What should 
make you think so ?” 

“ I don’t know. I fancied you were not very happy. Am I mis- 
taken ?” 


UNDER FOUR EYES 


63 


“ No,” said the young man, simply. “ I don’t say you are.” 

“ And I don’t say that it is your fault if you are not,” continued 
Pearl, very gently 

“ I hope it isn’t, but of course one never knows.” 

“ That’s the worst of it !” she exclaimed, impulsively. “ One never 
knows things in time. If one did, it might be all so different.” 

“ I don’t know how I could have made things different — that has 
been my difficulty, always.” 

“ But at least a man has this advantage: he can take his life into 
his own hands once he is a man. A woman cannot.” 

“ I suppose not, unless — ” 

“Unless what?” she persisted, seeing that he broke off and hesi- 
tated. 

“ I was going to say unless she married, but of course her life 
would not be in her own hands then.” 

“No,” said Pearl, with a shade of bitterness in her voice which 
did not escape him, “ less then than ever.” 

The remembrance of Mr. Lewis flashed back upon her at that mo- 
ment, but she turned from it with impatience. If, there and then, 
some one could have assured her that she should never see him 
again, she would have been relieved and thankful. 

“ Still, she is more her own mistress than she was, or at least she 
changes her master.” 

“ And may go out of the frying-pan into the fire in doing so. No, 
I can quite understand the force of that clause in the prayers of a 
Jew, in which he thanks God that he was not born a woman.” 

“Yes, but the Jewish estimate of women is so low,” remonstrated 
Hector. 

“ Is it lower than that of most Christians?” she asked, rather wist- 
fully. 

“ Well, I don’t know. I hear m^n letting fly at women some- 
times, and saying that they are at the bottom of all the evil in the 
world, and all that sort of thing; but when the accounts are made up, 
I fancy that they will be found to have had a hand in most of the 
good.” 

He spoke eagerly, with the enthusiasm of a very young and very 
pure-minded man. It was easy to see that such feminine influence 
as had been about him in his home-life was of the best and highest 
kind, and that, as yet, he had known no imbittering or debasing ex- 
perience which could obliterate it. 

But how long would that last ? Pearl asked herself, doubtfully, as 


64 


THE PRICE OF A PEARL 


she listened to his impulsive defence of her sex. How long would 
it be before he would turn round, like most other men of her ac- 
quaintance, and lay the blame of reckless living and misspent life 
upon the “ weaker vessel ” ? 

“I hope you will always think as you do,” she said, with a little 
sigh that appealed to his sympathy. “ I wish Stephen did.” 

“ Oh, don’t mind what he says. Brothers are never compliment- 
ary.” 

“ I don’t want compliments. I only want to be believed in ; not 
to be thought a great deal better than I am, or a great deal worse, 
which is what usually happens to a woman.” 

“ I can sympathize with you there. It paralyzes one not to be 
believed in.” And once again the shadow crept over his face, which 
had already revealed to her quick eyes the existence of some secret 
unhappiness. 

She watched him for some moments in silence — the silence that is 
more eloquent than speech between a man and a woman, in which 
passion is sometimes born and sometimes dies; in which a passive 
feeling can become an active force, either for good or for evil. 

“ Now I know,” she said, gently, “ why your sky is not uncloud- 
ed—” 

“ Oh, here you are, old fellow ! I have been round to call on you 
and Stephen made his appearance at the head of the broad, shallow 
steps leading down from the conservatory. 

Such was the revulsion in Hector’s feelings at this most unwel- 
come interruption that he had considerable difficulty in getting up 
the degree of cordiality in his greeting of Pearl’s brother which old 
companionship demanded. 

Glancing furtively from one to the other, Master Stephen was not 
slow to perceive that he had broken in upon a tete-a-tete, “ a game 
under four eyes,” in which each of the players was evidently equally 
interested. His sister, to be sure, was an old hand at this sort of 
thing, but how about the other? 

“ However, it’s no business of mine,” reflected Stephen, as he 
shook hands warmly with his former comrade. 

“ Bertie Meredith is in the drawing-room,” he said, cheerfully. “I 
met him outside, and he came in at once when I told him you were 
here. Lady Dalrymple wants you to stop and dine this evening, 
and she has asked him and me, too. Fact!” he added, seeing a 
look of undisguised amazement on Pearl’s face. 

“ It’s awfully kind of Lady Dalrymple,” exclaimed Hector, who 


UNDER FOUR EYES 


65 


had not lived long enough to silspect the existence of double mo- 
tives in such an impromptu invitation. 

“ Well, come in and settle it with her. You’ll find Bertie as queer 
a fish as ever, but he’ll be delighted to see you.” 

“ I forgot that he was a friend of yours, Mr. MacAdam,” said 
Pearl, somewhat coldly, as it seemed to him. 

Some indefinable change had come over her since her brother’s 
entrance; the light had died out of her eyes, and the warmth of her 
manner was perceptibly chilled. Yet surely he had done nothing to 
displease her. 

“ We are great chums, and I’m very glad he has come back, but — 
I hardly think I had better stop to dinner. You see, I’ve been here 
a couple of hours already.” 

He spoke to Stephen, but he looked at Pearl with eyes which said 
to her as plainly as eyes could say, “If you don’t ask me, after what 
you said to me just now, I don’t care to stay.” 

“ I am sorry you kept such accurate account of the time ; I did 
not.” 

She said no more, but he offered no further objection. The gates 
of Paradise were slowly rolling back on their hinges, inviting him to 
enter the charmed precincts within. He forgot that all the sin and 
misery of which the world is. full began just there, and nowhere 
else. 

“ Will wonders ever cease ?” said Stephen, drawing his sister aside 
for a moment as they entered the house together. “ I thought the 
Bat was the only man worth cultivating nowadays.” 

“Oh! she always has two strings to her bow,” the girl answered, 
moodily. v 

The knowledge of Lady Dalrymple’s motives chilled her newly- 
awakened interest, and she was tormented besides by a secret re- 
morse of which her brother knew nothing. But it had always been 
the bane of Pearl’s existence, no less than the natural result of her 
education, that she could never be taken unawares. Her abnormal 
length of mental vision robbed her of all, or nearly all, the sweetness 
and unquestioning happiness of youth. 

5 


CHAPTER IX 


A YOUNGER SON 

“He hath known you but three days, 

And already you are no stranger.” 

It was a very eccentric-looking individual who picked himself up, 
or perhaps, more correctly, unfolded himself from his low seat, when 
Hector reappeared in Lady Dalrymple’s drawing-room. Lord Her- 
bert — called by his friends Bertie — Meredith was a younger son of 
the Duke of Tenterbury, phenomenally lengthy of limb, lean of fig- 
ure, and quizzical of countenance. Indeed Pearl, who had the eye, 
if not the pencil, of a merciless caricaturist, once hit off his peculiar 
appearance with great aptitude by suggesting that he must have 
been made up out of old remnants, inasmuch as no limb or member 
matched its fellow. He had two left legs and somebody else’s arms, 
one shoulder was at least two degrees higher than the other, and his 
very eyes were dissimilar, not merely in color, but in actual focus. 

And yet, in spite of all these physical shortcomings, so exceeding- 
ly genial was the expression of his freckled face that no one had 
ever been known to call Bertie Meredith ugly. Grotesque he cer- 
tainly was, but by no means repellent, and his perfect breeding never 
failed to triumph over all his personal disadvantages. Moreover, he 
had a power often denied to handsome men of attracting great af- 
fection and stanch friendships from members of his own sex. By 
women he was not indeed disliked, but his appearance excited com- 
passion in those rare instances where it did not excite ridicule. 

There was something incongruous in the idea of Bertie Meredith 
ever figuring as a lover, and very few women can quite succeed in 
dissociating this idea, whether actual or potential, from the various 
men whom they come across in society. 

Pearl’s manner, however, gave no indication either of dislike or of 
compassion. Rather was it expressive of a polite indifference which 
revealed her in a new light to one at least of the four who stood 
by while she shook hands with Lord Bertie. 


A YOUNGER SON 


67 


“ I had no idea you were coming back so soon, and yon, I sup- 
pose, had no idea that you would meet an old friend.” 

“Well, your brother prepared me for that,” he said, squinting 
affectionately at Hector over his long bony nose; “but I want to 
know what you are doing up here, MacAdam. Fingall is the dullest 
hole on the face of the earth, unless you happen to have some regu- 
lar occupation there.” 

“ This is polite to us,” observed Pearl, with one of her demure 
smiles, “especially as Fingall has gone out of its way to amuse Lord 
Bertie.” 

“ Oh, but I have a regular occupation.” 

“Only no one knows what it is,” said Lady Dalrymple, in a state- 
ly parenthesis. 

“But what on earth can MacAdam find to amuse him? that’s 
what I want to know.” 

“ Oh, you had better leave that to us,” Pearl said, laughingly. 
“ With three distinct cliques in the town, all ready to fly at each 
other’s throats, to say nothing of Lady Lowick,” here Lord Bertie 
made a wry face, “and Mrs. Mandeville,” here Lady Dalryinple’s 
gesture of dignified displeasure was equally expressive, “ I think it 
will go hard with us if we can’t manage to amuse Mr. MacAdam as 
long as he chooses to stay.” 

“ And how long will that be ?” inquired Bertie, returning to the 
charge with amusing pertinacity. 

“Oh, I don’t know; I am going to look about me for a bit,” re- 
plied Hector, somewhat evasively. “ At all eveints, Pin not afraid of 
being bored.” 

“No, you don’t look much like it, I must say.” And in this im- 
pression Lord Bertie was pretty strongly confirmed long before din- 
ner was over. 

It was not very difficult for a man of his sagacity to discover that 
the part assigned to himself that delicious spring evening was pas- 
sive rather than active. 

He made an excellent fourth in the partie-carree that remained in 
the drawing-room while Pearl and Hector were wandering about 
the fernery. No better “ buffer ” could have been found to inter- 
pose between Lady Dalrymple and the graceless Stephen, or to shield 
poor Miss Seaford from the many whims and caprices of her pa- 
troness, and no more perfect background for a tete-a-tete could have 
been devised than that furnished by his low dreamy preludes on the 
organ, when the two truant members of the party returned from their 


68 


THE PRICE OF A PEARL 


nocturnal ramble, and took refuge in the comparative seclusion of 
the back drawing-room. 

“Evidently this must be a new ruse on the old woman’s part,” he 
reflected, as he suffered his fingers to wander at will over the key- 
boards; “but what has become of Mr. Lewis? The kaleidoscope 
seems to have had a good shaking up since I was here last.” 

But if Lady Dalrymple’s tactics surprised him, still more was he 
exercised by Pearl herself. The lamps being brought in, revealed 
her in a different light from any in which he had yet seen her, with 
eyes not sparkling as was their wont in mocking diablerie , nor yet 
glancing, as he had sometimes known them, with a kind of uncanny 
fascination, but rather shining through a haze of some new emotion, 
her very capacity for which he had hitherto been strongly disposed 
to question. 

Stephen’s voice at his elbow broke in upon his cogitations. 

“ I say, are you going to Lady Lowick’s fancy-ball ?” 

“I don’t know. I can’t find a character to suit me, unless it 
might be Dominie Sampson,” replied Bertie, with dry humor. 

“ I wish you’d do me a favor if you are going, and that is to get 
her ladyship to send a card to Mrs. Mandeville.” 

“But I abhor Mrs. Mandeville !” said the other, in a simple serious 
tone that occasionally puzzled his best friends. 

“But look here, you needn’t dance with her, you know,” replied 
Stephen, who would certainly have taken offence at such a declara- 
tion from any one but Bertie. 

“I don’t intend to. I value my reputation too highly.” 

“ Well, but will you get her asked, there’s a good fellow ? She’s 
really dying to go. And she’s got an awfully pretty dress. By 
Jove ! she’ll snuff out every one else in the room if she does go.” 

“ Hum ! I doubt if the woman exists who could snuff out Miss 
Merry weather.” 

“ Ob, Pearl don’t count. I suppose — well, yes, of course, she 
is tolerably good-looking, but it is in a different style from Mrs. 
Mandeville.” 

“ Widely different,” assented Lord Bertie, as he pulled out two 
or three stops, and proceeded to execute a pas seul over the pedals. 

“ Well, you’ll get her asked, won’t you ?” urged Stephen, with an 
affectionately approving glance at his own reflection in one of the 
tall pier-glasses that lined the inner room. 

“ Pll get her asked — yes, but I can’t ask myself.” 

“ Lady Lowick would do anything for you.” 


A YOUNGER SON 


69 


“So I’ve heard; but I don’t want to be given an inch for fear she 
would force an ell on me. Do you want a card for MacAdam ?” 

“Oh, the old girl here will look after him ; as you may perceive, 
he’s the white-headed boy at present.” 

“ I thought I did perceive something of the sort. Yes, he is sure 
to be at the ball.” Lord Bertie brought his music to a full stop 
with these words, turned somewhat sharply round, and faced his au- 
dience with a slightly quizzical smile. 

“ That sounds rather like old days,” said Hector, meeting this 
challenge with a boyish blush that made him look curiously young 
and fresh beside his companion, fair of face and smooth of skin as 
she was. 

“ I don’t suppose the old days crossed your mind till this minute,” 
replied Lord Bertie, twisting himself off the bench as he spoke, and 
letting off the remaining wind in the organ with sundry unearthly 
grunts and squeaks that caused Pearl to put her fingers to her ears. 

When they had ceased, she turned to Hector and said, playfully : 

“I observe a great tendency in Lord Bertie to bring you to book 
about everything.” 

“Well, I know no one who has a better right,” replied Hector, 
with praiseworthy loyalty to his college mentor. 

“ Only he must not be allowed to monopolize it,” and there was a 
direct challenge in Pearl’s eyes as she looked up at Lord Bertie 
Meredith. 

“ If I can help it — you shall not dispute it.” This was the an- 
swer that she read in his eyes, although his lips kept perfect silence, 
and her own face flushed a little, notwithstanding her habitual self- 
control. 

She was conscious of a new and helpless feeling of dismay and 
resentment when the two young men presently left the house to- 
gether ; and even Hector’s fervent thanks to Lady Dalrymple, and 
reverential gratitude to herself, could not quite allay her anxiety as 
to what Lord Bertie might choose to say of her when he should find 
himself alone with his friend. 

From which it may be augured that Pearl’s conscience reproached 
her on other matters besides that private one connected with Mr. 
Lewis, of which it was not possible that Lord Bertie could know 
anything. 

Yet she might have trusted him if she had only known. He was 
too wise in his generation to commit the fatal error of trying to set 
his friend against Miss Merry weather, even had he been more fully 


70 


THE PRICE OF A PEARL 


convinced than he was that Hector’s feeling for her was other than 
a boy’s first fancy. 

“ Come to my rooms,” he said, when Lady Dalrymple’s door had 
closed behind them. “ We have a lot to say to each other.” 

And Hector willingly assented. 

This man knew more of him than any one else in the world. He 
alone had ever discovered the existence of that proverbial skeleton 
in the cupboard, which seldom fails sooner or later to take up its 
abode with all but the most exceptionally favored of mortals, but 
which had accompanied Hector from early boyhood. So he was not 
unprepared for the question put to him later by Lord Bertie, when 
the two were comfortably seated together over a bright little wood 
fire, whose pungent odor mingled pleasantly with the smoke of their 
own cigars. 

“MacAdam, what are you really doing up here?” 

“ I am going to study surgery at the hospital, if you must 
know.” 

“ Mercy on us !” ejaculated Lord Bertie. “ What an extraordinary 
idea !” 

“ Well, look here, Bertie, I must do something? and if my father 
won’t allow me to take the smallest interest in the estate, or help him 
in any way, I don’t see that he has any right to complain if I strike 
out in my own line.” 

“ And does he complain?” 

“ Well, he did at first, kicked up no end of a row, and consented 
at last on condition that I don’t study under the name of Mac- 
Adam.” 

“ That’s rather a rum condition, isn’t it ?” observed Bertie, in 
growing astonishment. 

“Not more rum than anything else about him. At all events, 
I’ve accepted it, and next October I mean to enter -my name at 
St. Basil’s as Hector Armytage. It won’t be a lie, for I was christ- 
ened so.” 

“And how will you manage here?” 

“ Oh, here, of course, it wouldn’t do to have an alias. I saw that 
cat once. But one can pick up a good deal at the hospital in an in- 
formal way. I’ve made friends with one of the house surgeons 
already, and he tells me that the college lectures are first-class.” 

“ Well, and afterwards? Do you intend to take out a degree as 
Dr. Armytage and to buy a practice, or become a junior partner, or 
what?” 


A YOUNGER SON 


71 


“I shall certainly take my degree, unless anything very unfore- 
seen happens to prevent it. As for practising, that’s some way 
off yet.” 

“But when did you take up the idea?” persisted his friend. “It 
seems such a queer one under the circumstances.” 

“ I first took it up the day I saw them opening your windpipe at 
Oxford. I knew I had found my vocation, and I mean to follow 
it up.” 

“ I can’t fancy you a doctor. You’re a first-rate nurse, as no one 
knows better than I do ; but there are such odious details connected 
with the medical profession, and the students for the most part are a 
rowdy lot.” 

“ I know they are; but one needn’t mix with them.” 

“ Have you and your governor parted friends ?” inquired Bertie, 
with an affectionate solicitude in his tone that did away with any- 
thing like awkwardness in the question. 

Hector shrugged his shoulders, not so much with bitterness or dis- 
respect as with a kind of hopeless resignation. 

“ We haven’t quarrelled,” he said, tersely ; “ but, my dear Bertie, 
when have my father and I ever been friends?” 

“Well, I don’t know anything about that; but if he doesn’t care 
for you deeply, I am much mistaken. I never saw a man so utterly 
upset when your life was in danger that time two years ago. I shall 
never forget it; he sobbed like a child. Your poor mother was much 
the more composed of the two. She never gave up hope, but your 
father was almost desperate.” 

“ So you have always told me. I should have thought myself that 
he was sorry I didn’t die on that occasion.” 

“Ah, MacAdam, I really think you’re unjust. After all, do you 
ever give him a chance of knowing you ?” 

“ Why has he never given me a chance of being known? Why 
has he held me at arm’s-length all my life, and more especially since 
my poor brother died? Why has he taken for granted always that 
I am and must be a scapegrace ? I ask any human being who has 
known him and known me, what I have done that my father should 
treat me as a stranger, and a stranger to be distrusted as well as dis- 
liked? Talk of injustice! It’s on his side, I fancy, more than 
mine,” and the young man bit his lip to keep down the mingled 
emotions of anger and wounded affection that threatened to choke 
his utterance. 

Bertie gave a low whistle of sympathy, stretched out his long legs, 


72 


THE PRICE OF A PEARL 


and contemplated his philanthropic-looking feet with an apparently 
absorbing interest until Hector had recovered his composure. 

“ Sorry I spoke,” he observed, quaintly, “ as the parrot said when 
it was taken out of the room for using bad language at prayers. 
But, you see, Fingall is the last place I ever expected you to turn 
up in, and I wanted to know all about it.” 

“ If it comes to that,” replied Hector, with assumed cheerfulness, 
“ why are you here yourself, old fellow ?” 

He drew his coat -sleeve furtively across his face as lie spoke, a 
simple and childlike gesture that went straight to his friend’s heart. 

“ How any father can turn the cold shoulder to a fellow like that, 
beats me,” thought Lord Bertie, as he drew away his eyes from a 
sight which was certainly not intended for them. 

“ I am looking after some property of my father’s on the quays. 
It is to be mine, I believe, some day, so I thought I might as well 
get to know something about it beforehand.” 

“ My argument exactly, but my father didn’t seem to see it. And 
yet, Heaven knows, I didn’t want to interfere with him.” 

“ Well, I’m glad to say mine doesn’t want to interfere with me, 
and so I do pretty much what I please, and I’ve had some queer ex- 
periences, I can tell you. If you really are going in for the saw- 
bones business, MacAdam, I can put you in the way of any amount 
of private practice.” 

Hector looked at him with a kind of admiring pride in his honest 
eyes which revealed a world of simple good feeling common to both 
men. 

“You never were like other people, Bertie,” he said, holding out 
a hand that was taken as heartily as it was offered. 

“ I don’t know that I ever was much tempted. When a fellow 
looks like a caricature, I suppose it is difficult to regard him as an 
ordinary mortal, and so he’s more or less let alone.” 

“ Not by any one who has a grain of sense,” retorted Hector, 
promptly. “And besides, old fellow, this doesn’t look very much 
like being let alone,” pointing to innumerable cards of invitation 
sticking out of the corners of the mirror over the mantel-piece. 

“Oh, as to that, there isn’t one of them I care a farthing about. 
By-the-way, I hear you took my place at Lady Dalrymple’s party on 
Wednesday ?” 

“Yes;” and Hector flushed a little under the searching glance 
now turned full upon him. “ It was a very pleasant party.” 

“ One needn’t ask how you got on ; the old lady wouldn’t have 


A YOUNGER SON 73 

invited you to-night in that unceremonious manner if she wasn’t 
prepared to give you the entree to her house.” 

“ She’s not so formidable as I fancied her at first. You know it 
was Merry weather who introduced me ?” 

“Yes.” Lord Bertie paused for a moment and privately scanned 
his friend’s features. “ The brother and sister are not much alike, 
are they ?” 

“ I should think not !” Hector answered, warmly. “ Neither in 
looks nor talk nor anything else.” 

“ She has all the brains,” remarked Bertie, in the cool judicial 
tones which the other remembered of old, and which had always 
made him aware of his own youthful inexperience. “Just the sort 
of woman to marry a prime-minister or an ambassador, and no doubt 
she will one of these days.” 

Hector’s face betrayed consternation as well as surprise. Clearly 
Miss Merry weather had not presented herself to him under this for- 
midable aspect. 

“Do prime-ministers and ambassadors come to Fingall?” he in- 
quired, trying in vain to speak as coolly and as judicially as Bertie. 

“Occasionally; at least, the prime -minister does in recess, and 
budding premiers pretty frequently for political meetings. Besides, 
she meets no end of people in town. There’s a certain wealthy 
banker means to see more of her when she next goes up, or I’m 
much mistaken.” 

“ You mean Mr. Lewis, I suppose ?” 

“Yes, Lewis. You’ve seen him, then? Oh, of course. You must 
have met him the other night.” 

“ Miss Merry weather doesn’t care a rap for Am,” announced Hec- 
tor, with a decision which was either comic or pathetic as one chose 
to look at it. 

To Bertie Meredith it partook of both qualities. 

“ If you knew Miss Merry weather as well as I do,” he observed, 
softly and even pityingly, “you would know that that was not likely 
to affect the question.” 

“ I may not have known her very long,” replied Hector, stoutly, 
“but I’ll go bail for her unworldliness. If the old lady has tried to 
make her mercenary, all I can say is she hasn’t succeeded.” 

Bertie had reached the end of his cigar, and was for some mo- 
ments too busily occupied in removing it from its amber mouth- 
piece to make any comment on this, to him, somewhat startling 
proposition. 


74 


TI1E PRICE OF A PEARL 


When he did speak, his words were carefully chosen and devoid 
of any personal animus. 

“ I don’t think that worldliness would ever flourish in your soci- 
ety, Mac Adam. You are so emphatically what the French would 
call bon enfant .” 

“ It’s not that,” returned Hector, a little impatiently, “ but it isn’t 
in her. I wonder you should think it was ; but evidently you don’t 
understand each other. She told me this evening that she was 
afraid of you.” 

A gentle smile of derision played round Lord Bertie’s lips. 

“I should not have thought so, but one never knows what effect 
one may produce on one’s fellows. At all events, I admire Miss 
Merryweather greatly, though I have no doubt she doesn’t reckon 
me among her admirers.” 

Hector made no reply. Simple as he was, he perceived that on 
this point there was not likely to be any sympathy between himself 
and his friend; and once he had made this discover} 7 , he was anx- 
ious to get away and be alone with the blissful visions of his own 
imagination. 

Lord Bertie sat up over the fire for some time after his friend had 
left him, until the glowing fagots had been reduced to smouldering 
embers. 

He was called an odd fish sometimes, even by those who drew 
most liberally on his ready sympathy; and since unselfishness is a 
plant of rare growth, at least in masculine soil, it must be admitted 
that he did his best to deserve the epithet. 

But if Hector had guessed with what deep compassion he was re- 
garded by his friend, it is possible that his own feelings of warm 
respect and affection for him might have been somewhat severely 
shaken. 


CHAPTER X 


THE SECOND STRING 

“ II y a de certains esprits a qui il faut donner longtemps des esperances, et 
ce sont les delicats.” 

If Lord Bertie Meredith was more or less puzzled and bewildered 
during the next two or three weeks, he was by no means alone in his 
perplexity. To many people besides himself Lady Dalrymple’s tac- 
tics were as difficult of comprehension as the moves of a skilled 
player on a chess - board to one who understands nothing of the 
game. 

She was wont to go up to London about this season of the year, 
taking Pearl with her, but, to the surprise of Fingall society, she 
suddenly announced her intention of remaining at home for the 
present — a piece of masterly inaction on her part which made it im- 
possible for any one to say that she was hunting down Mr. Lewis. 

In vain did Lady Lowick probe her with searching questions and 
pointed comments as to the wisdom of allowing Miss Merryweather 
to lose her London season at such an important moment. 

“ As for that,” said the old lady, quietly, “I have never gone to 
town to please my goddaughter, and I am not staying away to 
please her. When do you think of going yourself, if it is not an 
impertinent question ?” 

“The day after the ball. I promised Lord Lowick not to delay 
any longer than that. Indeed, I had some difficulty in persuading 
him to come back for it himself.” 

“ I wonder at that,” observed Lady Dalrymple, with the placid 
impertinence which had always made her the best-hated woman in 
Fingall. “Of course it will be worth a certain number of votes for 
Johnny at the next election.” 

Lady Lowick drew herself up in proud displeasure. 

“ I beg to assure you most emphatically, Lady Dalrymple, that 
such an idea of bidding for popularity has never entered either into 
his father’s head or mine.” 


76 


TIIE PRICE OF A PEARL 


“ It is a very obvious idea, though, and most natural under the 
circumstances. There is always a certain amount of bribery and 
corruption attached to getting into Parliament. Come, my dear 
Lady Lowick, it is not so very long since your husband sat in the 
Lower House himself that you need to pretend to be so entirely 
innocent of all these pardonable little devices for keeping one’s con- 
stituents in good-humor.” 

“ They were never in the least necessary in his case.” And Lady 
Lowick’s countenance at that moment was expressive of a some- 
what common and vixenish type of fury not usually associated with 
the idea of a coronet. 

“No? Well, I’m afraid you will find that Johnny will require a 
little adventitious help of that sort ; and, by-the-way, that reminds 
me : do you think it is quite advisable to forbid him to make any 
friends among the young fellows of his own age at college?” 

“ It was the only condition under which his father or I could con- 
sent to his going. You see, unfortunately, he could not stand for 
the university unless he had gone through the course and taken a 
degree, but as for making friends — ” 

“ I should have thought the more he made the better for his 
chances,” interrupted Lady Dalrymple. “ If you will excuse my 
saying so, you and Lord Lowick are on a wrong tack altogether. 
It never answers to kick away the ladder when one has climbed to 
the top of the wall.” 

“ I don’t understand what you mean,” the other answered, an- 
grily. “I have always desired the best society for my children, and 
brought them up to desire it for themselves.” 

“ Quite so, my dear Lady Lowick, but you make a mistake in 
supposing that the best society is confined to the ranks of the peer- 
age. However, Johnny’s career is no business of mine. Of course 
you are sending a card for your ball to Mr. MacAdam. His pedi- 
gree ought entirely to satisfy you.” 

“ Oh, of course. He is quite an acquisition. Bertie Meredith 
brought him to see me the other day, and I thought him most 
pleasing.” 

“ Well enough for Fingali,” assented Lady Dalrymple, carelessly. 
“ One is a little inclined to make swans of one’s geese in this be- 
nighted place; don’t you think so?” 

“I should have said myself that Mr. MacAdam would be con- 
sidered a perfect gentleman in any place, and, as you know, I am 
not usually considered very easy to please.” 


THE SECOND STRING 


71 


“ Well, no, I have never heard that weakness laid to your charge, 
and, as you say, the boy is a gentleman, although anywhere else we 
should probably think him rather young and very unformed.” 

“I dare say that fault will soon be cured in your house. You 
ask him to it, I hear, very frequently.” 

Lady Dalrymple shook her head with a gently pitying smile, 
more galling than one of undiluted contempt to the vulgar-minded 
little woman who was forever attempting to get the better of her. 

A “I allow him to come here whenever he pleases. He is at the 
safest age in the world, as far as Pearl is concerned. Your Johnny 
and he were born, I should think, about the same year.” 

Lady Lowick was at last silenced, and soon after took her de- 
parture. She could not deny that her Johnny was allowed the 
entree to Lady Dal rym pie’s house, and it suited her that he should 
avail himself pretty freely of his privileges; but she also could not 
blind herself as to the value that was put upon his visits, and she 
was well aware that there was no equality between him and young 
MacAdam beyond that of age. 

Meanwhile, Hector himself, innocent as yet of the intense curios- 
ity and keen interest excited on his behalf among the match-making 
mammas and marriageable daughters in Fingall, was dividing his 
time, in accordance with a maxim dear to our grandmothers, be- 
tween “ books and work and healthful play.” 

Of his intention to read and to attend certain college lectures he 
had made no secret from the first, and it was commonly supposed 
that his work began and ended with these scientific studies. 

Only Bertie Meredith could have explained why it was that his 
friend had located himself in the most unfashionable quarter of the 
city, from which no representations, however forcible, could dis- 
lodge him. 

One drawback, and one only, existed for Hector in the geography 
of his lodgings. If they were within easy reach of the Royal In- 
firmary, they were more than two miles away from Monmouth 
Square, and a good deal of his spare cash was expended in hansom 
fares, for the purpose of shortening that distance as much as pos- 
sible. 

That most of his spare time was spent in Lady Dalrymple’s 
drawing-rooms, it is scarcely necessary to say. Report had by no 
means exaggerated the frequency of her invitations; and for the 
present, at least, the course of his feeling for Pearl Merryweather — 
whatever it might be — was allowed to run smoothly. 


78 


THE PRICE OF A PEARL 


Such obstacles as he encountered in the way of any more perfect 
enjoyment of her society came from the girl herself rather than from 
her godmother. He would fain, for example, have intercepted her 
in her morning walks across the square between her father’s house 
and that of Lady Dalrymple. But when one evening, in the privacy 
of the back drawing-room, after dinner, lie proceeded to unfold his 
plans to the chief person concerned in them, she received them with 
the frankest disapproval. 

“There are exactly one hundred and forty -four houses in this 
square,” she informed him, in her demure accents, “and all the 
chief sitting-rooms ‘give’ upon it. And all the inmates, without 
exception, sit at their windows. For which reason I am never seen 
to walk with anything in the shape of a man, unless it may be a 
male baby or a very old gentleman. Now, Mr. MacAdam, can I 
honestly place you in either of those two categories?” 

“ But do you mean to say that the people have really nothing 
better to do than to watch their neighbors?” 

“ Apparently not. It is very strange, because I can’t myself get 
up any eagerness about their affairs, but it is none the less true ; so I 
am afraid you must only walk with me on Sunday afternoons, when 
the band plays, and the whole square turns out in its best clothes.” 

“I hate those Sunday promenades,” said the young man, impetu- 
ously ; “ I hate being one of a crowd, and hearing the same fellows 
make the same asinine remarks every week regularly about the same 
girls.” 

“In fact, you hate Fingall society, as I rather suspected you 
would when you had seen enough of it,” Pearl answered, with her 
meaning smile. 

“ I should hate it if I were you, and allowed it to rule my actions.” 

“ Not my actions, only my movements. I cannot have a hundred 
and forty-four house-maids following them with all their eyes, to say 
nothing of their mistresses.” 

“ Are they equally inquisitive at St. Bridget’s Place ?” inquired 
Hector, as if struck by a sudden and ingenious idea. 

It so far communicated itself to the girl beside him as to tinge 
her cheeks with a delicate pink. 

“I am scarcely known there,” she said, quietly; “but why do 
you ask ?” 

“You go there sometimes — for singing-lessons.” 

“ Not as often as I should like to. I have not gone since — that 
morning.” 


THE SECOND STRING 


79 


“ I have,” Hector said, with significant brevity ; and then, per- 
ceiving that the pink was deepening rather than otherwise, he add- 
ed, “ I go often, and listen outside that window. I wish you would 
go and take a lesson to-morrow.” 

“ I can sing for you here any day you please,” she answered, 
teasingly. 

“ I want to hear you there. Why should you refuse me ? What 
harm will it do to any one? You won’t even see me, unless you 
come into the square.” 

“ And that I shall most certainly not do,” said Pearl, with prompt 
decision. 

“Are you not fond of that aunt?” he pursued. “You seem to 
see very little of her.” 

“It is because I am fond of her that I am not allowed to see 
much of her. That has always been the rule in my life.” 

He looked at her for a moment in'silent surprise. 

“ Why don’t you rule your own life, Miss Merry weather ?” 

“Why? Because I am bound hand and foot with silken fetters 
that I cannot break. Because, having no carriage of my own, I 
must submit to be driven. Because — but why should I waste my 
time making explanations which you can’t understand? You are a 
man, I am a woman. C'est tout dire” 

“ I think that I do understand, better than most people — better 
than people who have known you a great deal longer than I have.” 

“ Better than your friend Lord Bertie, for instance,” she said, 
with a challenge in her tone which he instantly accepted. 

“ Why don’t you like him, Miss Merry weather ?” 

Pearl raised her eyebrows. 

“Have you ever asked him why he doesn’t like me?” she retort- 
ed, coolly. 

“ He admires you immensely. He has told me so himself.” 

“ That is very kind of him, but for all that he does not like me. 
He would tell you why, I dare say, if you asked him.” 

She spoke composedly, but her lips were trembling, and there 
were not wanting other signs which, to more experienced eyes than 
his, might have betrayed some secret uneasiness. m 

“You do him great injustice,” said Hector, warmly, “if you 
think that he would ever take your name in vain.” 

“ I have no wish to be unjust to Lord Bertie, but, as I told you 
the night you first met him here, he and I do not get on. Perhaps 
it is my fault, perhaps it is his ; but your friend is no friend of 


80 


THE PRICE OF A PEARL 


mine, and if he has his way, I am afraid — ” the smile with which 
she broke off at this point was of the sort that has made strong 
men weak and wise men foolish ever since the world began. 

There was a moment’s breathless silence. 

“ If he has his way,” repeated Hector, and waited with quicken- 
ing pulses. If Lord Bertie had seen him at that moment he 
wo'uld have been sorry for his friend. It would not have occurred 
to him that there was any reason to be equally sorry for her. 

“ I don’t know that I had better finish the sentence ; perhaps I 
was taking too much for granted,” said Pearl, in answer to this 
appeal. 

The look she encountered on his face disquieted her, used as she was 
to experiences of this sort, and culpably careless of their after-effects. 

“ Come,” she added, lightly. “ You are too serious by far. I have 
no quarrel with Lord Bertie, and I have no doubt that he is an ex- 
cellent friend for you.” 

“ That was not what you were going to say just now.” 

“ It is all I am going to say, for I am wanted in the next room.” 

“ What does your brother do in the morning ?” inquired Hector, 
following her to the piano, where she began turning over some of 
the many songs heaped upon it. 

“ His duty in that state of life to which he is about to be called. 
He is learning book-keeping by double entry. Perhaps you could 
help him ?” 

“ Would you be there?” he asked, eagerly. 

“ I. can’t promise ; you must take your chance.” 

“You won’t promise anything I ask you, and yet I’m not at all 
unreasonable.” 

“ I refuse most people point-blank. So you ought to consider 
yourself flattered.” 

“ Would you refuse Mr. Lewis?” 

“ That would depend entirely upon the nature of his request.” 

“ Is he a friend of yours ?” 

“ He is good enough to call himself my friend.” 

“ Does that mean, then, that you don’t believe him ?” 

“ If I didn^f, I should certainly believe no one else,” she an- 
swered, coolly, with a tantalizing little nod that aroused all his dor- 
mant jealousy. 

With folded arms and in moody silence he stood by while she 
chose her song, chewing the cud of a bitter reflection that Bertie 
was, after all, right in his forecast of her future. 


THE SECOND STRING 


81 


She glanced at him a little uneasily as she sat down to the piano. 
What had he heard that he should ask these searching* questions ? 

“ Am I in the way ?” he asked, coldly. 

“ I think you will hear better if you go a little farther off, but 
yon can do what you like.” 

He availed himself of this permission to go and stand beside her, 
and at sight of the song which she had placed upon the desk his 
face cleared visibly. 

“Your mother’s song,” she murmured, as she struck the opening 
chords, and she felt rather than saw the telltale moisture in his 
eyes which betrayed his gratitude. 

It may have been for that reason that she sang with a greater 
depth of feeling than usual. The subjective element of which Mrs. 
Fursden had complained was in abeyance for the moment. 

He thanked her fervently when she had finished.' 

“ It ends sadly,” she said, pointing to the concluding couplet: 

‘“For a love lost, in a spring frost, 

Singing Heigho, heigho!’ 

Frost kills a good many blossoms, I fancy.” 

“It depends on the tree,” he answered, meaningly. “Some of 
them can stand a good deal of frost.” 

“ Ah, that is your mother’s teaching,” said the girl, wistfully. “I 
should like to have known her.” 

“I wish with all my heart — ” he paused for a moment, as if to 
weigh his words, and his earnest eyes sought hers. “ I wish you 
had known each other; you would have been — friends, I am cer- 
tain.” 

“ That boy is in love with you,” said Lady Dalrymple, when she 
and Pearl were left alone together a few minutes later. 

Pearl’s only answer was a deprecatory shrug of the shoulders. 

“ He is absurdly young, of course, and quite a boy still, but you 
might possibly do worse,” hazarded her godmother, after a slight 
pause. 

“ And also much better,” retorted the other, rather impatiently. 

“Oh, well, yes — if you look at it in that light. I am glad to see 
you are becoming so sensible,” and Lady Dalrymple concluded in 
her own mind that Pearl must have had a letter from Mr. Lewis, or 
she would never have taken her up so sharply. 

“ I dare say I shall be as sensible as any one can desire some day.” 

6 


82 


THE PRICE OF A PEARL 


There was a hidden mockery in the girl’s tone that would have 
been suggestive to a less worldly ear than Lady Dalrymple’s of 
some bitter self-contempt. 

“ Bertie took him out to Lady Lowick’s last Tuesday. No doubt 
she intends to capture him for Sybil, if she can.” 

“ I don’t suppose Bertie would allow that,” replied Pearl, with a 
slight yawn, as if the subject wearied her. 

“He has a very high opinion of this young man ; says that he did 
very well at college, and that he has come here to study.” 

“ You seem to have been taking his character.” And there was a 
touch of her former impatience in Pearl’s manner which did not es- 
cape her godmother. 

“ Naturally, my dear, I make inquiries when I see him hovering 
about you like a moth round a candle,” she answered, smilingly. 

“ And did you give your reasons to Bertie ?” 

“Oh, dear me, no,” and the old lady laughed rather knowingly. 
“ I never make confidences of that sort.” 

She might have added that she never received them. Pearl 
roused her curiosity often enough, but she seldom chose to satisfy 
it; and what the girl might really hope or fear or believe was less 
known to her godmother than to any one else in the wide world. 
Lady Dalrymple was disposed, however, to congratulate herself on 
the fact that her second bowstring was by no means a despicable 
substitute for the first, if that should be so unfortunate as to fail 
her. And if not, why, the boy was at an age to get over it. So re- 
flected her ladyship with perfect complacency, unmindful of the fact 
that human hearts are scarcely reliable counters in the great chance 
game of life. 


CHAPTER XI 


UNDINE OR LORELEI ? 

“ . . . Qui sait souffrir et se taire 
S’eloigne de vous en pleurant.” 

For several days before it took place Lady Lowick’s fancy-ball 
was the one absorbing topic of conversation, alike among those who 
looked forward to attending it and those who had been of set pur- 
pose omitted from the list of invitations. For in spite of Lady Dal- 
rymple’s broad hint that the projected entertainment would be worth 
a certain number of votes for “Johnny” at the next election, the 
newly created peeress went out of her way to offend many of her 
old “ bourgeois ” acquaintances by passing them over on an occasion 
when even worldly wisdom, apart from that fine feeling which be- 
gets tact, would have dictated the widest hospitality. 

She announced her intention from the first of having only “the 
cream de la cream ” at her ball. And here it may be noted, by-the- 
way, that even the possession of a pretty villa in the south of France 
could not insure Lady Lowick’s correct rendering of certain French 
idioms with which she was in the habit of interlarding her conver- 
sation. 

With this “creamy” end in view she had therefore drafted down 
from London a large contingent of idle and worthless young men, 
to the exclusion of many steady-going students, budding manufact- 
urers, and aspiring professionals nearer home, whose only social defi- 
ciency consisted in their lack of pedigree. 

“ Was ever anything so suicidal ? Is the woman mad ?” exclaimed 
Lady Dalrymple, putting up her eyeglass, and surveying the large 
half-filled rooms with an air of contemptuous amazement. 

They were so vast, so brilliant, and withal so chilly as to suggest 
the idea of a winter palace, and the dancers looked insignificant and 
ill at ease in their various fantastic costumes. 

“ Are we too early ?” suggested Pearl, glancing at the clock above 
the open doorway, where Lady Lowick, habited as a mediaeval 


84 


THE PRICE OF A PEARL 


queen, and resplendent in point-lace and diamonds, was doing her 
best to counterfeit the manners of a great lady, or, more correctly, 
of that ideal of the species which existed only in her own imagi- 
nation. For the foolish baroness had seen too little of the best 
society to be aware that insolence is not an integral part of good 
breeding. 

“ Early ? Oh, dear, no ; but the woman is a born idiot! We shall 
have a radical in for Fingall at the next election, and only her to 
thank for it. How do you do, Lord Bertie ? Have you ever been 
present before at such a dismal entertainment ?” 

“ We shall have room for dancing, at all events,” he replied, with 
a slightly quizzical smile that seemed to include himself and his own 
grotesque attire. He was got up as a court jester, and, unlike most 
of the other men present that evening, he had contrived to look his 
part. 

“ Which, on the whole, is an advantage,” observed Pearl, lightly. 
“ I am not going to trouble myself to-night about the political future 
of Fingall — I intend to enjoy myself.” 

Her eyes wandered as she spoke in the direction of the door- 
way, overlooking on their journey two or three of her habitual 
partners — chronic admirers, as Stephen had christened them — 
who were now hurrying up in request of a dance. Lord Bertie 
watched her with something of sternness in his odd three-cornered 
face. 

“ Lorelei,” he said to himself, as his glance took in the graceful 
simplicity of her clinging white draperies and the wealth of her 
lovely hair, part of which had been allowed to fall in a golden 
shower below her knee, while the remainder was plaited like a cor- 
onet on the top of her head. 

She looked like a water-spirit, newly risen from the waves. It 
was not perhaps surprising that to prejudiced eyes she should recall 
the faithless maiden whose name is associated only with wrecked 
lives and broken hearts. 

u En attendant ,” said Lord Bertie, having completed his appar- 
ently dispassionate scrutiny, “ will you give me a dance, Miss Merry- 
weather ?” 

There was a momentary flash of haughty displeasure in Pearl’s 
eyes as she turned sharply round and said coldly that she had made 
no engagements — yet. 

“ In that case, I hope you will be kind to me. First come, first 
served, gentlemen,” he said, good-humoredly, to a couple of dancers 


UNDINE OR LORELEI? 


85 


whose errand was plainly visible in their admiring glances at his fair 
companion. 

She tantalized each of them for a few moments, and then sent 
them away with the promise of a dance later in the evening — Lord 
Bertie standing by during the colloquy, and squinting over his pro- 
gramme. 

“And the golden comb, Miss Merry weather ?” he said, tentatively, 
as he led her to her place in the quadrille. 

“The golden comb?” she repeated, somewhat mystified at his 
words. “ Did you imagine I was posing as a mermaid, Lord 
Bertie ?” 

“To tell you the truth,” he replied, “you bring Heine to ray mind 
rather than Tennyson.” 

They were in the act of bowing and setting to each other in the 
first figure as he made this speech, and he could not but perceive 
that she was deeply hurt by the implication contained in it. The 
discovery was a shock to him. 

“ You are true to your character,” she said, quietly. “ A jester is 
allowed to say very bitter things, I believe, by way of amusing his 
audience.” 

“Another name for jester is fool,” said Bertie, rather ruefully, 
“and I must admit that it applies to me to-night. Please forgive 
me, Miss Merry weather.” 

“ I am sorry to have made such an impression on you, but I think 
and hope that no one else will make a similar mistake.” 

Her nostril was inflated, and her lip curled not so much with con- 
tempt as with a painful effort to retain her self-control. 

Bertie felt with genuine compunction that he had wounded her, 
and all the chivalry of his nature was called into play. 

“ No one else could possibly be so idiotic,” he said, warmly. 

“As to mistake Undine for Lorelei? I am not sure, Lord Bertie. 
It is a mistake that has been made bv men pretty often.” 

“ Undine !” he repeated, thoughtfully. “ Of course. She had no 
soul to begin with, if I remember rightly?” 

“ Nor heart either,” retorted Pearl, in that mocking tone which 
so often served her as a refuge from her real feeling, and seldom 
failed to convey a false impression to those who heard it. 

In the present instance, however, Lord Bertie was not deceived. 

“Pardon me,” he corrected her, gently, “but if I am not mis- 
taken, Undine had a heart, for she lost it, and found her soul in 
doing so.” 


86 


THE PRICE OF A PEARL 


He was walking backwards before her as he spoke, and had am- 
ple opportunity for studying the expression of her mobile face and 
noting the sudden light that came into it, as if his somewhat mean- 
ing words had acted as an inspiration. For once in her life she al- 
lowed her better nature full play, and said, simply : 

“ I see you remember the story.” 

“ I wish I had remembered it earlier in the evening. Shall we 
take a turn on the terrace ? It can hardly be colder outside than in 
here.” 

She made no objection, and he led her through the rooms, more 
than one pair of eyes following them, as each well knew, with ill- 
natured curiosity. 

It was a relief to pass from under this social lens into the clear 
moonlight on the terrace. 

The night wind blew gently across the sea, and sighed tenderly 
through the sombre foliage of the great elm-trees in the park. It 
found its echo in the sigh that came from Pearl’s heart, no less than 
from her lips, as she stood and listened. 

“ Is this poor fool forgiven ?” her companion said, presently, after 
having watched her in silence for some moments. 

“ Does he want forgiveness ?” she replied, averting her face, and 
looking steadfastly at the long, glittering roadway, created by the 
moon’s beams across the trackless waters. 

“ We all want forgiveness from each other pretty often. We 
manage to hurt each other somehow, we poor mortals, even when 
we don’t intend it.” 

“You did intend it, Lord Bertie.” 

Her eyes were still turned away, but he felt, from the vibration 
in her voice, that they were full of unshed tears, and his own vision 
was blurred for the moment as he answered, quickly : 

“ I did intend it, in a measure! It was ignoble of me; but a man 
like me is apt to be ignoble, Miss Merryweather, where a woman 
like you is concerned. Your power is so great and your tender 
mercies are so cruel !” 

There was a moment’s pause, in which he had time to feel breath- 
less at his own daring, and to wonder vaguely if she would ever 
speak to him again. And yet he would not have recalled his words, 
even if he could. That had passed between them which made some 
such explanation as this a necessity, if they were not to continue to 
misjudge and mistrust each other in the future. 

“ I, at least,” said Pearl, after what seemed to both an intermi- 


UNDINE OR LORELEI? 


87 


nable silence, “ did not intend to be cruel. If you will remember, 
I told you so at the time ; and — no one knows — no one need know.” 

“ I am aware that no one knows. I owe that to your generosity, 
and yet — ” He broke off with a sigh that reproached her more 
sharply than any word he had yet uttered. 

“ I understand,” she said, bitterly, and her voice trembled with 
wounded feeling. “You wish to warn your friend. I have seen 
that all along, and I know of no reason why you should spare me.” 

“ I have no wish to warn MacAdam,” replied Bertie, very quietly. 
“ He would not be warned. He is at the age that believes every- 
thing and fears nothing, and he must buy his own experience; but 
if I thought it was the least use, I would ask you to remember that 
in your hands he is a mere child.” 

“A child!” she repeated, rather wistfully. “You think him a 
child, Lord Bertie?” 

“ Anything but a child in his aims and intentions. He has the 
purpose of a man, but he knows absolutely nothing of life as you 
and I know it. He has the child’s heart — a thing one envies some- 
how when one has lost it one’s self.” 

“And what if one has never had it at all?” said Pearl, still wist- 
fully, as his ear noted with an almost feminine quickness of intui- 
tion. 

Was Undine indeed finding her soul thus? And, if it were so, 
how about that absent lover with whom her name had been so lately 
coupled ? Three weeks ago Mr. Lewis had had no rival in the field. 
How would it be if he came back to-morrow to receive his final an- 
swer? 

Lord Bertie would not have given much for his chances at this 
moment. It was as much as he could do himself, in the face of his 
previous bitter experience, to keep cool to-night, and hold his strange- 
ly mingled feelings in the imperious check that self-respect imposed 
upon them. When the girl’s best self was uppermost, as now, she 
was irresistible. 

“ The child’s heart does not flourish in what Lady Lowick calls le 
bel monde ,” he said, with half-humorous cynicism in answer to her 
hesitating question. 

“I suppose not. You had better keep your friend out of it; and 
we had better go back to it, or Aunt Cecilia will be sending out to 
look for me.” 

“You are not angry with me, Miss Merry weather ?” 

“ Have I any right to be angry ?” And for the first time that even- 


88 


THE PRICE OF A PEARL 


ing Pearl looked him fall in the face with sad, steady eyes, in which 
there was no after-thought of coquetry. 

Five minutes hence he knew that the old unholy flicker would be 
there again. Once back in the glare of the brilliantly lighted ball- 
room she would be possessed again by the fever of excitement, the 
passion for admiration, the spirit of mockery that made her so often 
a delight to others and a torment to herself. 

Just for these few brief moments she was gentle, humble, and re- 
gretful. Her mask was laid aside, and he knew that this was the 
real woman whom it was his fate to desire and love in vain. 

Against her feminine wiles he could steel himself ; against her 
contrition he was powerless, and there was nothing for it but to turn 
and make his retreat as speedily as possible. 

“ I am playing my part well,” he said, straightening himself from 
his leaning posture with a sudden characteristic jerk, and offering 
her his arm to lead her back to the house. “ I am a fool, and you 
will do well to remind me of my calling, Miss Merry weather, when- 
ever you see me in danger of forgetting it.” 

Whether she understood his meaning or not he was uncertain, for 
the next moment they were interrupted, and he took good care not 
to be alone with her again during the remainder of the evening. She 
might be Undine to Hector MacAdam, but to him she could only be 
a Lorelei. 


CHAPTER XII 


A SIMPLE FRACTURE 

“She looks as clear 

As morning roses newly washed with dew.” 

“Stephen, who is the fair-haired boy that seems so entirely gone 
on your sister ?” 

There was a little spice of malice in the question, and still more, 
perhaps, in the sharply critical glance that accompanied it, which 
Stephen followed with a smile compounded of embarrassment and re- 
luctance. It was born of the secret consciousness that Mrs. Mande- 
ville regarded all young men below the age of thirty as her lawful 
quarry, to be hunted down, captured, and triumphantly displayed as 
occasion demanded. 

He had enjoyed the process himself with a kind of fatuous satis- 
faction that is apt to amuse the disinterested spectator when it does 
not excite his contempt or impatience, but he was never particularly 
anxious to see it applied to fresh victims, and for some reason or 
other, which he would not have cared to avow, he had done his best 
to conceal Hector MacAdam’s existence from Mrs. Mandeville. 

It was not till supper was over and the various couples began to 
find their way back to the drawing-room that Stephen realized the 
futility of any further ruse on his part, although he could not even 
now lay down his arras without a struggle. 

The combatants were, however, unevenly matched, as a glance at 
their two faces would have sufficed to show. The young man was 
in bondage, less perhaps to the woman’s charms than to her force of 
character, and he occasionally felt the pressure of his chain, but lacked 
either the courage or the energy to break it. 

She flattered him and she bullied him, a mode of treatment that 
in the bands of an unprincipled woman answers very well with an 
indolent and purposeless man. And what she wanted him to do he 
did, even if it went against his grain, because in the long-run it was 
less unpleasant to give in than to hold out. To be sure, the position 


90 


THE PRICE OF A PEARL 


of cat’s-paw is never a dignified one, and Stephen was uneasily aware 
sometimes that the popular rumor ascribed it to him, not without 
somejudicule at his expense and some malevolence at hers. 

Her presence at the ball to-night was due to his intervention; but 
although he had obtained the card of invitation, he could not insure 
the welcome which was needed to make it other than the emptiest 
of' compliments. 

Probably Mrs. Mandeville was conscious of this fact, for she had 
been in a very ill-humor throughout the evening, notwithstanding 
the sensation created by her handsome dress and risque appearance, 
and the undisguised^ envy which both had called forth from the un- 
married women whom she had robbed of their partners. 

But there are thorns to all roses. Lord Bertie had passed her 
with a distant bow ; Lady Lowick had looked her over from head to 
foot with galling impertinence ; Lady Dalrymple had greeted her 
with a freezing politeness far more disconcerting than downright 
rudeness; and last, not least, the best-looking man in the room had 
been completely insensible to her many attractions, and seemed to 
have neither eyes nor ears for any one except Pearl Merry weather. 

Mrs. Mandeville was resolved that this state of things should Con- 
tinue no longer, and summoned her slave Stephen to be an unwilling 
instrument in putting an end to it. 

“You wouldn’t care for the fellow,” he replied, uneasily, in an- 
swer to her first question. 

“ That is neither here nor there. I want to know who he is. What 
is his name, and where does he come from ?” 

“ His name is Hector MacAdam, and he comes from a place in 
Scotland called Adamscourt that belongs to his father, and will be- 
long to him, no doubt, in the course of nature.” Stephen gave his 
evidence glibly, but none the less unwilling for that. 

“What on earth is he doing at Fingall?” she demanded, after a 
prolonged stare at Hector’s profile, which looked eager and animated 
in close juxtaposition with that of Miss Merryweather. 

“ I really don’t know ; studying, I believe— attending lectures at 
college. You had better ask Bertie Meredith. They’re as thick as 
pease.” 

“That man thick with Lord Bertie !” repeated Mrs. Mandeville, in 
a tone of stupefaction. 

“Yes, I believe he nursed him through diphtheria at Oxford, or 
Bertie nursed him, I won’t be sure which. Anyhow, they’re chums. 
And Bertie swears by him.” 


A SIMPLE FRACTURE 


91 


You must introduce him to me,” said Mrs. Mandeville, decisively; 
but Stephen again demurred. 

“ He isn’t in the least in your line, no more than Bertie himself. 
He s a nice fellow, but you never could make anything out of him. 
I shouldn’t advise you to try.” 

“ We shall soon see that. At all events, I intend to have a dance 
with him to-night. He is the one man in the room who waltzes mv 
step.” y 

“Yours is the same as my sister's, I think,” said Stephen, rather 
sulkily. 

Of course it is, or she wouldn’t have given. him so many dances, 
you may be quite sure of that.” And Mrs. Mandeville’s laugh was 
distinctly spiteful. 

“ They seem to understand each other,” remarked Stephen, after 
a pause, in which they both watched the two dancers, although with 
different feelings. 

“ When this is over,” said Mrs. Mandeville, beginning to fan 
herself with a slight flush of vexation, “you may introduce him 
to me.” 

“I thought you said you weren’t going to dance any more?” 

“ Not with you, certainly. I have been kicked quite enough for 
one evening.” 

“By Johnny Watson, I suppose. Here he comes, by the same 
token, for another waltz.” 

The moment was not propitious, as Stephen recognized, for re- 
minding Mrs. Mandeville that there had been a time when his step, 
and his only, had agreed with hers. 

The Honorable John was indeed bearing down upon them some- 
what unsteadily, as Mrs. Mandeville might have perceived, if her 
thoughts had not been preoccupied with the unholy desire of luring 
Pearl’s partner away from her. 

Besides, it is quite possible that she herself, after the manner of 
her species, had consented to have her glass filled up at supper a 
little more frequently than was altogether prudent or desirable. 

“ I can’t refuse Mr. Watson,” she said, in answer to Johnny’s 
boisterous invitation. 

Johnny’s mamma was looking at her with such evident dread and 
disapproval as to add considerable zest to the situation in Mrs. 
Mandeville’s eyes. 

She was anxious, moreover, to look after Pearl’s movements in 
the ball-room, and discover for herself how far Stephen’s assurance, 


92 


THE PRICE OE A PEARL 


that she could make nothing of young MacAdam, might be trium- 
phantly refuted. 

But disappointment seemed destined to dog her footsteps. Pearl 
had disappeared, and Hector with her, before Mrs. Mandeville 
reached the ball-room, and Johnny’s dancing was not calculated to 
improve matters. 

By the time that she had taken a couple of rounds with the 
future Lord Lowick, and felt the heavy imprint of his clownish heel 
upon her shapely instep, she began to wish most sincerely that she 
had kept to her resolution of not dancing any more, and sought to 
urge upon her partner the advantage of sitting out for the remainder 
o*f the waltz. 

“ No, no,” quoth Johnny, elated as much by his imaginary success 
as by the real champagne he had imbibed at supper. “ I am going 
to hold on to you, Mrs. Mandeville. You’re the only girl — lady, I 
mean — that knows how to dance a little. I say ! will you look out 
where you’re going?” this in an exceedingly offensive and brawling 
tone to a man who had unfortunately crossed his somewhat eccentric 
orbit, and nearly been knocked down in consequence. Johnny 
could hardly have resented it more if he had been knocked down 
himself. 

And meanwhile the rooms were fast thinning, the guests were 
rapidly melting away, the wearied maids in the cloak-room were be- 
sieged with applications for the various garments committed to their 
charge, and the clack of whips, the stamping of impatient horses, 
and the crunching of wheels upon the carriage-drive, mingled in one 
distracting din, and threatened to drown the music of the orchestra. 

“ What a fuss it does seem about nothing, to be sure, and how 
the sun must laugh at us when he looks in through the chinks of 
the shutters and sees us all capering about for bare life like lunatics.” 

Pearl was standing in the vestibule, cloaked and hooded and ready 
for departure, and bearing the trying ordeal of exposure to the 
dawning daylight with a serenity only possible to the very young 
or the very beautiful. 

Had she been an ordinary pink-and-white beauty she would have 
turned blue, while a brown complexion would have looked yellow in 
in the searching rays of the rising sun ; but Pearl’s white skin suc- 
cessfully defied them, and she coolly drew aside the curtains with a 
royal disregard of appearances, which to her less fortunate compeers 
was simply exasperating, not less, but rather more, because Hector 
MacAdam stood beside her. 


A SIMPLE FRACTURE 


93 


“It is all very well,” he said, laughingly, “to call us lunatics now 
when the fun is over, but while it was going on I think we had our 
share of it.” 

“ I know ; but the daylight makes one feel ashamed of one’s self 
for thinking that sort of thing fun at all.” 

“Do you always have such gloomy reflections after a ball?” 

“ Well, you see, there is always the coming back, which is dread- 
ful ! Fancy going to bed now, for instance; and yet if I don’t I 
shall feel like a washed-out rag to-morrow.” 

“I don’t intend to go to bed,” said Hector; “I shouldn’t sleep a 
wink if I did.” 

“Then what shall you do, if it’s not an impertinent question? 
Go to the first service at St. Bridget’s, or to the college chapel, or 
what ?” 

“Oh, I often go to St. Bridget’s. It’s all on my way, you know, 
to the Inf — ” 

He broke off abruptly with a boyish gesture of dismay, and 
blushed crimson. He had all but let his cat out of the bag, where 
it had been kept so carefully hidden during the past three weeks. 
But Pearl was so amazed at the first clause of his sentence that she 
did not take in the full significance of its sudden break. 

“ Do you really mean that you get up early and go to the cathe- 
dral service ?” 

“ I don’t go every day, and I never get up for that purpose,” he 
explained, bashfully, anxious apparently, as young men frequently 
are, to repudiate any charge of unusual piety or earnestness that 
might be brought forward against him. Then, emboldened by some- 
thing in her expression, he added in an undertone, audible only to 
herself, “ It’s connected in my mind with you somehow. I had just 
come out from seeing it the day I heard you singing in the square.” 

“ Should you like me to sing for you there again some day ?” she 
asked him, not less softly than he had spoken. 

He looked at her in a breathless delight that halted for its utterance. 

“ I — do you mean really ? Are you in earnest ?” 

“ I am quite in earnest. Several times this evening I had it in 
my mind to ask you if you liked sermons, but I thought the ques- 
tion might possibly seem unseasonable.” 

“ Sermon,” he repeated, somewhat bewildered ; “ but I thought 
you spoke of a song.” 

“ Exactly, but you will have to buy the one with the other. My 
father is to preach at the cathedral next Sunday, and after that he 


94 


TIIE PRICE OF A PEARL 


and I are going to see my aunt, Mrs. Fursden, in the little house 
where you first heard me sing, and — you may come too, if you like. 
Does that arrangement please you ?” 

“ Rather !” said Hector, with forcible brevity. “ Where am I to 
meet you, and when ?” 

“At the west door, at ten minutes past three. I’ve ordered the 
anthem and the service, and you won’t have heard anything better at 
Magdalen.” 

“And your father is to preach?” 

“Yes; there was nothing else wanted to add to your rapture, was 
there?” Pearl asked, demurely. 

“ Well, I have no doubt it will be a good sermon. Is it for a 
charity ?” 

“ I forget what it is for. I can find out, if you like, and let you 
know before Sunday,” and Pearl’s eyes danced with mischief, not- 
withstanding the solemnity of the subject. 

“But you promise to sing afterwards?” 

“I promise, and — dear me! what a noise they are making in the 
ball-room. What can be the matter?” for the music had come to a 
sudden stop, and hysterical screams were plainly audible above the 
trampling of feet and the clatter of angry voices. 

Lady Dalrymple, who had been reposing in an easy-chair, dis- 
creetly blind and deaf to all that was going on at the window, 
looked up now and inquired what had happened. 

“ It sounds like a brawl,” said Hector. “ I hear Watson’s voice 
saying it was not his fault. I thought that young fellow would 
make an ass of himself before the ball was over.” 

“Is he ever anything else?” Lady Dalrymple inquired, with lan- 
guid satire. “Do go and see what’s the matter, Mr. Mac Adam. 
There’s always sure to be some esclandre at a thing of this sort. 
You can’t make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear.” 

Lord Bertie Meredith made his appearance at that moment, mar- 
vellously grotesque and weird-looking in his motley attire, and wear- 
ing a very deprecating, yet withal slightly comical expression under 
his cap and bells. 

“ Oh, MacAdam, I’m glad you’re not gone. You might be of use 
in there. There’s been an accident. Mrs. Mandeville — ” 

He had no need to finish the sentence, for at the mere mention of 
an accident, apart from the proper name that accompanied it, Hector 
was gone already like an arrow from the bow, to Pearl’s unutterable 
amazement. 


A SIMPLE FRACTUPvE 


95 


“ And why should Mr. McAdam be of more use than any one 
else?” inquired Lady Dal rym pie, not without a little asperity in her 
tone directed towards Lord Bertie, who, for his part, looked as un- 
comfortable as his worst enemy could have desired. 

“Oh, well ! you see he understands all that sort of thing.” 

“What sort of thing?” interrupted her ladyship. “You said 
there had been an accident.” 

“ So there has, and Mrs. Mandeville has broken her arm.” 

“And is Mr. MacAdam to mend it? Upon my word, I think 
you might have made a more suitable choice, Lord Bertie. This is 
all a ruse, you may be certain, and you have thrown your friend 
straight into the arms of the most designing woman in Fingall.” 

“Oh, I think not. You see, her arm is really broken, and Mac- 
Adam has rather a turn for surgery. He doesn’t want it talked 
about, but that is what he is doing up here.” 

Lady Dairy mple turned in displeased astonishment to her god- 
daughter. 

“ Had you any idea of this freak ?” 

“ Not the slightest,” replied Pearl, so quietly that no one would 
have guessed either her surprise or her secret exultation at the dis- 
covery. 

“Then in plain English,” pursued the old lady, severely, “ your 
friend is walking the hospitals.” 

“ Well, not exactly. He’s not a regular student just yet ; but 
please, Lady Dalrymple, don’t say anything about it to him, or he’ll 
never forgive me.” 

“ Do you mean to say he is going to make it his profession ?” 

This in a tone of ineffable disgust which Pearl secretly resented. 

“ He is going to learn his business thoroughly. As for practising, 
of course that’s another matter. It may not be necessary.” 

“ Times are changed,” said Lady Dalrymple, disdainfully. “ When 
I was young, the heir of Adamscourt would not have found his 
amusement in a dissecting-room. However, I don’t pretend to un- 
derstand the young people of the present day. Johnny Watson is 
responsible for this business, I suppose? Too much champagne at 
supper, eh ?” 

“ I fancy it was something of that sort,” Lord Bertie admitted, 
with benevolent reluctance. 

“Humph! Just what I should expect from a parvenu's son. 
Well, I suppose we need not stay here till it is breakfast-time, need 
we? Are we waiting for Mrs. Mandeville’s arm to be set?” 


96 


THE PRICE OF A PEARL 


“ It would be charitable,” suggested Pearl, carelessly, “ to inquire 
for her before we go.” 

Lady Dalrymple looked at her goddaughter with one of her most 
ambiguous smiles. 

“Charity has never been one of your failings, my dear; but if you 
like to have the woman with you in the carriage, far be it from me 
to say you nay. It might be safer, all things considered ; only don’t 
ask me to talk to her, that’s all.” 

But before Pearl could reply to this thrust, certainly calculated to 
draw blood in the form of a vivid blush, a card was put into Lord 
Bertie’s hand, on which Hector himself had hastily scrawled these 
few words : 

“ Only a simple fracture, and I can manage it. Please see Lady 
D. to her carriage, and make my excuses.” 

A sim-ple fracture. Yes. But perhaps there was more than a 
broken limb involved in it. One thing was certain, and that was 
that chance or sinister fate had brought Hector into relationship 
with Mrs. Mandeville under circumstances the reverse of common- 
place or uninteresting, and it would not be her fault if the acquaint- 
ance was not developed into something more than a mere flirtation. 
For the first time in her whole life, Pearl knew what it meant to 
be jealous when she drove away in the dawn of that June morning 
from the house where her rival remained behind. 


part irtr 


CHAPTER I 
PIN PRICKS 

“Why did she love him? Curious heart, be still. 

Is human love the growth of human will?” 

To Stephen Merryweather’s unspeakable dismay and annoyance, 
the long-expected summons from Mr. Lewis, for which he had been 
desired to hold himself in readiness, arrived at the most inopportune 
moment that could have been chosen. It had been unpleasant 
enough already to be compelled to stand by in awkward and helpless 
misery while young MacAdam commanded the situation, and pro- 
ceeded to bind up Mrs. Mandeville’s fractured arm with the skill of 
an adept, and with the zeal and ardor of the youthful enthusiast to 
whom “ a case” has not yet ceased to represent a person. 

But this was a trifling grievance compared with that of having 
to leave the amateur surgeon in undisputed possession of the field. 
Stephen knew enough of Mrs. Mandeville to feel convinced that she 
would make the most of her accident, if only that her convalescence 
might be enlivened by frequent visits from the good-looking youth 
whom chance had sent to her assistance. 

It was certainly an odd turn of fate that the brother and sister, 
so unlike in character, and so little sympathetic in taste and senti- 
ment, should yet meet now on common ground, and each writhe 
secretly in jealous misgiving at the thought of anything like inti- 
macy between Hector and Mrs. Mandeville. Neither of them in- 
deed confided in the other, but their very silence was eloquent, and 
revealed more to each than either would have willingly acknowl- 
edged. 

For Stephen to excuse himself was of course out of the question. 
He was uneasily aware that Mr. Lewis had strained a point in ad- 
7 




98 


THE PRICE OF A PEARL 


mitting him to the bank at all, and that any chance of future pro- 
motion would depend entirely on his own behavior. 

Very reluctantly, therefore, he prepared to depart, encumbered by 
a good deal of useless baggage, and leaving behind a large number 
. of unpaid bills, which, as he explained carefully to his sister, were on 
no account to be sent after him. 

“But, Stephen dear,” remonstrated Pearl, in serious anxiety, “ what 
shall I do if they are sent in to papa? You know you told the 
people you would let them have their money last Christmas.” 

“ I know I did, but I’ve had no luck lately.” 

“ Wise people would say it was a mistake to trust to luck. I 
should be so much happier about you if I thought you would give 
up having anything to do with those horrid betting-men. I am cer- 
tain more than half of your money goes into their pockets.” 

“Oh, don’t talk rubbish,” replied Stephen, good-humoredly. 
“ What do you know about it? Do you suppose your friend Lewis 
doesn’t bet ? How do you think he makes his pile, if he doesn’t ? 
Only he calls it by another name, that’s all !” 

“ I don’t believe he makes his pile, as you call it, in any way that 
isn’t perfectly fair and above-board.” 

“ Well, so do I. If I choose to put a pony on such and such a 
horse, and if a fellow is willing to take my odds, I can see nothing 
dishonest in my winning. The Bat does precisely the same when 
he buys shares cheap and sells ’em dear, only he stakes his cus- 
tomers’ money and I stake my own ; so I’m the most honest of 
the two.” 

“But you don’t pay your bills,” replied Pearl, going off at a tan- 
gent, like a true woman, from the original subject of discussion, 
when it presented this unforeseen knot to be unravelled. 

“ They’ll get paid some time or other, never fear. When you 
marry old Lewis I shall expect you to stump up, since you’re so 
virtuous about them. By-the-way, what message shall I give him 
from you?” 

“ None, for he’s coming back directly.” 

“Is he though, by Jove! The plot is thickening. What an- 
swer are you going to give him, old girl, eh ?” 

“ Perhaps I have given him my answer already,” said the girl, 
evasively. 

“ Not a final one, I take it, or he wouldn’t be coming back. 
You’d better say yes next time, my dear. A bird in hand is 
worth two in the bush any day.” 


PIN PRICKS 


99 ' 


Tliere was just sufficient meaning in this speech to make Pearl 
uncomfortable, and she hastened to turn the conversation. 

“ I suppose that one reason for your being sent for so suddenly 
is that he wants you to be settled before he goes away.” 

“ I know I wish he had put it off a little longer. It is deuced 
inconvenient to have to go now. You’d like me to stay on; you 
know you would.” 

“ Of course I wish you could have stayed on. You hardly need 
to be told that, do you ?” 

“Oh, yes, yes! — but over and above sisterly affection, and all 
that sort of thing, I shouldn’t have been in the way; whereas, as 
it is, you see, you’ll have a double loss.” And Stephen winked 
solemnly at his sister’s reflection in the looking-glass, observing 
with secret triumph that she could not entirely succeed in keep- 
ing her countenance. 

“ I shouldn’t have seen much of you, even if you had stayed,” 
she replied, with creditable coolness ; “ you would have driven 
over every day to ask for Mrs. Mandeville.” 

“ I don’t suppose you’ll see very much of your friend MacAdam 
in future. He’ll spend most of his time with her, I expect, when 
he’s not walking the hospital. I hope you admire his taste ?” 

“ I admire his purpose very much indeed. I like a man who 
carves out his life for himself, instead of drifting with the stream 
and wasting all his energies.” 

Stephen shrugged his shoulders. 

“ If I was in his shoes I should enjoy my life, and not bother 
myself about carving it out, or carving dead bodies up, or any 
stupid grind of that sort. However, I have no doubt that he’ll 
amuse himself pretty well for the next few weeks.” 

“ Possibly,” suggested Pearl, rather sarcastically, “ his ideas of 
amusement may not be precisely the same as yours.” 

She had an unfortunate capacity for saying the wrong thing to 
her brother ; and his short laugh on the present occasion was dis- 
tinctly disagreeable as he retorted, coldly : 

“ Daresay you hope they’re not.” 

Pearl’s next words were scarcely calculated to smooth down his 
ruffled sensibilities. 

“I must say,” she observed, loftily, “that it is very odd of Mrs. 
Mandeville tostay on at the Lo wicks’ house, considering how very 
cavalierly they have always treated her.” 

“ Well, seeing that their hopeful son was responsible for the ac- 


100 


THE PRICE OF A PEARL 


cident, I should think that the least they could do was to offer her 
hospitality.” 

“ If I had been in her place I should never have accepted it. Be- 
sides, she must know that it is very inconvenient to them to keep 
her. They were to have left Fingall the day after the ball.” 

“ I should think no one in town was particularly anxious to see 
them. Besides, she was ordered to stay quiet. I suppose you’ll 
allow her to obey her doctor.” 

Stephen’s flushed face and sharpened accents were alike indica- 
tive of exasperation, and Pearl began to wish that she had abstained 
from gratuitous criticism of one whom she was fast learning to re- 
gard as an enemy. 

“ Don’t let us light up to the last moment,” she said, more gently 
than she had yet spoken. “I suppose we shall never be of the 
same mind about Mrs. Mandeville.” 

“ Well, don’t you be too sure that Mac Adam will take your view 
of her.” And Stephen drove away shortly afterwards, having cer- 
tainly contrived to leave a very unpleasant impression behind in 
the mind of the one person who alone could be said to bear him 
anything like an active and real affection. The tears that poor 
Pearl shed after his departure sprang less from tenderness of re- 
gret than from wounded feeling. She could not but perceive that 
Stephen wished to give her pain, and that he was so well acquainted 
with her vulnerable point as to have succeeded in doing it. And 
yet, but three short weeks ago how she would have scoffed at the 
idea of any ill-natured words from her brother having the power 
thus to torture her ! How she would have scorned the notion of 
anything like rivalry between herself and Mrs. Mandeville ! and 
with what righteous indignation would she have repelled the charge 
of feminine jealousy which to-day, alas ! was by no means ground- 
less. 

The fact, moreover, that she despised not less than she disliked 
the woman of whom she was jealous did not tend to restore Pearl’s 
equanimity. 

It was now nearly three years since Mrs. Mandeville had first made 
her appearance in Fingall, armed with letters of introduction to Lady 
Dalrymple which secured her immediate admission into its highest 
circles of society ; and this notwithstanding that her position was a 
questionable one, only to be maintained by the utmost prudence and 
discretion. 

For she was a grass-widow, and report hinted that she did not get 


PIN PRICKS 


101 


on with her husband. At all events, she had not accompanied him 
to India, although the presence of her little girl gave some reasona- 
ble ground, of course, for her separation from him. 

For this child she professed the most extravagant affection, and, 
being a woman of great personal attractions, she had no difficulty at 
first in enlisting public sympathy on her behalf. True, she did not 
actually complain of Mr. Mandeville’s indifference or unkindness ; 
yet most of her acquaintances imagined her to be neglected, and 
pitied her accordingly. 

But the handsome grass- widow was not wise in her generation. 
She overlooked, or deliberately set at naught, the supreme impor- 
tance of the female suffrage in social and domestic matters. She 
forgot that women are, after all, the real rulers of society, and that 
they are not to be offended with impunity. The old ladies who had 
been quite willing “ on the best authority ” to condemn Mr. Mande- 
ville as a “perfect brute,” began sensibly to modify their views when 
their own sons fell victims to the manifold charms and absorbing in- 
fluence of Mrs. Mandeville. 

In like manner the young wives, who in the first instance had been 
quite ready to espouse her cause, cooled off perceptibly as it became 
evident that their own husbands were among her warmest admirers. 

And the unmarried women, young and old, detested her, because 
she had never been at the smallest pains to conciliate them, and 
treated them, in fact, as a wholly negligeable quantity in the solution 
of her life’s problem. It was a mistake that is made very often by 
ladies in Mrs. xMandeville’s anomalous position, and before very long 
it bore its natural fruits. She began to find herself admonished 
where she had once been caressed, and snubbed, directly or indirectly 
as the case might be, in houses where she had formerly been treated 
with marked consideration. 

And finally it transpired, through the medium of one of Lady Dal- 
rymple’s satellites, that Mr. Mandeville, far from being a brute, was a 
much ill-used and all too long-suffering husband who had been half- 
ruined in India by his wife’s extravagance, and was compelled in self- 
defence to keep up a separate establishment. 

After the publication of this discreditable piece of intelligence, 
Mrs. Mandeville was pointedly overlooked by the principal social 
magnates of Fingall. They did not indeed turn their backs upon 
her, but they gave her the cold shoulder on every possible occasion. 
She could not complain of being actually insulted, but she was con- 
stantly made to feel herself slighted, and Lady Lo wick’s tardy invi- 


102 


THE PRICE OF A PEARL 


tation was only symptomatic of a very wide-spread feeling against 
her which did not fail to find frequent and various expression. 

Not that it is to be supposed, however, that Mrs. Mandeville’s ex- 
istence was by any means a solitary one, although it suited her at 
times to assume the role of an injured and deserted wife. Her 
pretty little house in one of the suburbs was the rendezvous of a 
great many unattached persons of both sexes, social malcontents of 
doubtful or of damaged reputation, who had nothing to lose and 
something to gain by their acquaintance with her, and scapegraces 
like Stephen Merryweather who would fain have been counted as 
rakes when in fact they were only greenhorns. 

In Pearl’s eyes the company that Mrs. Mandeville kept and the 
practices that went on beneath her roof were more pernicious to 
Stephen’s best interests than the terms of their intercourse, doubtful 
as these might be, and absurd if not culpable. 

She knew that high stakes were played for in that aesthetic little 
drawing-room, with its soft couches and graceful Oriental hangings 
and subdued lights, and she shrewdly suspected that much of her 
brother’s money found its way into the pockets of the hostess. 

That Pearl should therefore dislike and dread Mrs. Mandeville was 
natural enough, but till now her feelings had been purely disinter- 
ested. There had never been any question of rivalry between the 
two women, and the attitude which each occupied towards the other 
was one of armed neutrality rather than mutual hostility. 

A secret contempt on Pearl’s side, an unwilling admiration on that 
of Mrs. Mandeville, had alike found expression in cold civility and 
studied indifference, but there the matter ended. So it had been in 
the past, but so it was not likely to be in the future. Lady Lowick’s 
fancy-ball had changed the position of the two parties. 

With the quickness of intuition that accompanies a dawning love, 
Pearl had observed Mrs. Mandeville’s oeillades and manoeuvres to at- 
tract the attention of Hector, and she knew enough of her to be cer- 
tain that no failure at the outset would induce her to raise the siege. 

She was aware that Hector’s chivalrous feelings would be enlisted 
in the first instance by the interesting view which Mrs. Mandeville 
would in all probability present of her desolate position as a grass- 
widow ; and she foresaw with torturing distinctness that her own 
absence from Fingall during the summer months with Lady Dal- 
rymple would act like a hot-bed on the intimacy. 

Her only hope lay in Lord Bertie’s counter-influence over his 
friend, the very same that she had so recently dreaded in her own 


/ 




PIN PRICKS 103 

case, by a strange irony of fate to which her eyes could not be 
closed. 

But, happen what might, her lips must be sealed. The burden of 
solitary suffering, which sooner or later must be borne by every 
daughter of Eve, had surely never been laid on such untried shoul- 
ders as those of Pearl Merry weather, and she hardly knew even now 
exactly what it was that ailed her. 


CHAPTER II 


IS THERE NOT A CAUSE? 

“ D&s que l’homme a trouve k cette existence un pourquoi qui le satisfasse, 
le comment le laisse k peu pr&s indifferent.” 

Lady Dalrymple was out of temper ! This was not in itself a 
very remarkable occurrence, and its only claim to being recorded 
lies in the fact that the cause of her displeasure was an uncommon 
one. 

Like the traditional worm, Miss Seaford had actually turned upon 
her patroness, and having been desired to attend divine service at St. 
Bridget’s for the tacit, though not openly avowed purpose of keep- 
ing her eye on Pearl Merryweatber, she had so far forgotten herself 
and her humble position as to demur, if not indeed to remonstrate. 

“ Miss Merryweatber mentioned, I think, that she was going to 
accompany the archdeacon to St. Bridget’s,” said the poor lady, as 
decidedly as she dared. 

“Accompany the arch — fiddlestick!” retorted Lady Dalrymple, 
scornfully. “ What use will he be to her, I should like to know ? 
And can he look after her from the pulpit ? Do you imagine she 
has gone off to St. Bridget’s to listen to his prosing?” 

tyliss Seaford had her own ideas as to Pearl’s motives on this oc- 
casion, and in the depths of her poor little faded, dried-up heart she 
had some degree of sympathy with them. She was the more un- 
willing, therefore, to be used as a spy-glass, and looked the reluctance 
which she did not dare to utter. 

“ I understood that Miss Merryweather and her father were going 
to have tea with Mrs. Fursden when the service was over.” 

“ Yes,” said her ladyship, dryly, “ I understand as much as that 
myself. What I don’t understand is why the girl wants to go to 
church again, unless it is to meet some one she doesn’t care to meet 
here. I’ve put no spokes in her wheel that I’m aware of.” 

“ No,” assented Miss Seaford, with an alacrity somewhat offensive 
to her imperious employer. It seemed to imply that Lady Dal- 


IS THERE NOT A CAUSE? 


105 


rymple’s policy had been judiciously active as well as judiciously 
passive. 

“ I don’t kuow that I was asking your opinion in the matter,” the 
old lady said, very coldly. 

“ I beg your pardon, I’m sure,” murmured the unfortunate dragon, 
“ I only meant — ” 

“ That ’ll do, my good friend, I know what you mean better than 
you do yourself. Have the goodness to ring the bell, and tell them 
to send Martyn to me.” 

Miss Seaford had just crossed the room to obey this order, when 
the door was thrown open and Mr. Lewis made his appearance. 

In the twinkling of an eye the black cloud vanished from her 
ladyship’s countenance, and was replaced by one of her sweetest 
smiles. 

“ How delightful ! but why did you not give us any notice of your 
coming ? Pearl would never have gone out if she had had the least 
idea that you would turn up this afternoon.” 

Poor Mr. Lewis’s face fell visibly. 

“ I thought Miss Merry weather was always at home on Sunday 
afternoons.” 

“This is the first time I have ever known her go out; but, dear 
child, she was so anxious to hear her father preach at the cathedral 
that I could not find it in my heart to oppose her.” 

Used as Miss Seaford was to the lies which are so freely circulated 
in good society, she could scarcely help gasping for breath at this 
astounding utterance on the part of her patroness. 

“ Is she at St. Bridget’s, then ?” inquired Mr. Lewis. 

“Yes, and I am sorry to say she is not coming back immediately; 
she has promised to go and see her aunt after the service ; but of 
course you will dine here, Mr. Lewis.” 

“ Thank you very much indeed, but the fact is, I had come 
hoping to persuade Miss Merry weather and the archdeacon to dine 
with me — us, I mean. My uncle is with me, and we are staying in 
my house-boat, which is moored just below Ilazelbridge.” 

“ But I see no reason, Mr. Lewis, why they should not go. Pearl 
has no other engagement, I know, and if you like to follow her to 
the cathedral, you will certainly find her.” 

“Thank you, Lady Dairy mple, if you really think I shall not be 
interfering with any other engagement.” 

He spoke with diffidence, for he had caught an expression on 
Miss Seaford’s face that aroused his misgivings. 


106 


THE PRICE OF A PEARL 


“ She will go to tea with her aunt after the service, but that need 
not prevent her from dining with you. At all events, I give her 
carte blanche , as you can tell her, and, of course, as her father is 
with her, I need not have any anxiety about getting her home.” 

“ It is not a very easy matter to catch the archdeacon, I know ; 
but I thought I had more chance on Sunday than any other day, 
and I am so anxious to make my uncle known to him and Miss 
Merryweather.” 

“ Pearl will be delighted. I know she is longing to meet him. 
You have evidently aroused her curiosity.” 

Lady Dalrymple could scarcely conceal her elation. All this 
meant business — business of the most satisfactory kind— business in 
the shape of a splendid establishment and a princely settlement, if 
only Pearl could be induced to listen to reason. 

It was surely nothing short of providential that Mr. Lewis should 
have turned up on this particular afternoon, when her goddaughter 
had given disquieting evidence of being under the influence of some 
mood other than that which usually ruled her actions. 

“If she ever became romantic,” reflected her ladyship, uneasily, 
“ there is no saying to what absurd lengths she might not go in the 
way of quixotic sentiment.” 

No French mother could have had a more genuine horror of ro- 
mance than Lady Dalrymple. 

“I think you will be just in time for the anthem, if you go now, 
and please tell Pearl that I shall expect a most graphic account of 
her evening on board your floating hotel. She does so delight in a 
little bit of adventure. So did I at her age.” 

Mr. Lewis found it hard sometimes to frame a suitable response 
to Lady Dalrymple’s amiable speeches, and as often as not ended 
by saying nothing. He felt himself at a disadvantage before this 
scheming, astute, hard-headed old woman, whose schemes he hated 
all the more cordially because they happened to go in tj^e same 
direction with his own most sacred wishes. To a man who is at 
once purely and passionately in love, few things can be more galling 
than the consciousness that he is regarded in the light of a good 
mercantile speculation. It is perhaps the vulgarity rather than the 
actual iniquity of worldliness which makes it so unutterably distaste- 
ful to the unworldly. 

That Uncle Christopher should see Pearl in the first instance 
apart from the lowering and deadening influence of her godmother 
was the younger Lewis’s most fervent desire, and to compass it he 


IS THERE NOT A CAUSE? 


107 


had devised this somewhat unconventional and informal plan for 
bringing them together. 

Lady Dalrymple had done her utmost to assist him, yet he felt 
depressed and dispirited when he went out from her presence. He 
saw her with the keen eyes of his uncle as well as with his own, and 
he could not but remember a favorite saying of the shrewd old gen- 
tleman: “You won’t find a tame bird’s egg in a wild bird’s nest.” 

The opening notes of the anthem had just been played when he 
arrived at the cathedral. He entered it by one of the small side 
doors, and crept noiselessly up the aisle until he reached the tran- 
sept, where, as Lady Dalrymple had informed him, the archdeacon’s 
pew was to be found. 

A long shaft of rainbow light from the rose window lay upon the 
tessellated pavement, lengthening momently as the sun shifted, and 
scattering its fragments of warm color across the old faded banners 
of the knights of St. Bridget’s, beneath which they had fought man- 
fully in centuries gone by, and defended the city of Fingall against 
the inroads of the heathenish Danes. No other relics of antiquity 
were left in this modern building which, a quarter of a century be- 
fore, had arisen like a phoenix from the ashes out of the tumble- 
down old Gothic church from whence it took its title. 

There was none of that subtle atmosphere of devotion inseparable 
from an antique edifice of many years’ standing, in which genera- 
tion after generation of the children of men have worshipped their 
Maker. 

Till quite lately, indeed, the inhabitants of Fingall, although 
thronging in overwhelming numbers to its Sunday services, scarcely 
honored their cathedral as a house of prayer. To listen to the an- 
them rather than to hear the word of God was the avowed object of 
most of the congregations, and the nickname of “Biddy’s opera” 
bestowed upon the afternoon service by some irreverent wag of 
Fingall society was illustrative of the very mundane spirit in which 
it was attended. 

Latterly, however, things had changed somewhat for the better. 
There was a new dean, who sternly discountenanced the extremely 
undevotional practice of flocking out of the cathedral the moment 
the anthem was over, and as a natural consequence the attendance 
of the fashionable world had largely fallen off. 

This to the dean’s mind was as it should be. The vacant seats 
were promptly filled up by more earnest, if less important members 
of society, and the weekly offertories increased in inverse ratio to 


108 


THE PRICE OF A PEARL 


the absence of wealth and high position of the new congregations. 
St. Bridget’s began to retrieve its damaged reputation, and the rus- 
tling of silken garments ceased to be heard above the seraphic voices 
of the choir-boys. Not without fierce opposition and violent oppro- 
brium had these salutary changes been brought about, and the dean 
had at one period been the best-hated man in Fingall, a state of 
things which troubled him so little that after a while the tide turned, 
and the world began to testify a certain degree of respect for one who 
had never been at any pains to conceal his contempt of its opinion. 

All this Mr. Lewis knew, although he had never before attended 
the Sunday service at St. Bridget’s, and he therefore felt the more 
interest in the sight of the vast congregation which had gathered 
here to-day, attracted in part, no doubt, by the announcement that 
the archdeacon was to preach on behalf of some foreign mission. 
He had found a vacant chair close to the row of pews set apart for 
the church dignitaries and their families, and, during the singing of 
the anthem, he proceeded to send his blinking eyes in search of one 
who was never very long absent from his tenderest thoughts. 

Any interested spectator might have known when they at last 
lighted upon her by the sudden, swift smile which illumined his 
sober face, and for the moment transformed it. And such a specta- 
tor there was, little as he suspected it. 

From behind the curtain of the organ-loft, Lord Bertie Meredith 
had observed his entrance, not without some astonishment and a 
little dismay as to its ultimate consequences. For he had beheld 
other things from that same hidden post of observation a little ear- 
lier in the afternoon, things which had afforded him much food for 
reflection — and that not of the most comfortable description. 

He had seen Pearl Merry weather and Hector Mac Adam come up 
the aisle together, with a shy look on both their faces that he had 
never before observed on either, and, having placed their prayer- 
books in the archdeacon’s pew, they had next proceeded to walk 
round the cathedral, examining its monuments and stained-glass win- 
dows, although, as Bertie was well aware, each of the two could have 
passed a pretty stiff examination on most of its architectural features. 

A little later, as the church began to fill, they had gone out again 
into the open air, returning just before the bell ceased, accompanied 
by an elderly lady with a sweet face and unwieldy figure, both of 
them unfamiliar to Bertie. And now, as if to complicate matters 
still further, here was the former suitor turning up exactly at the 
wrong moment. 


IS THERE NOT A CAUSE? 


109 


But the anthem came to an end, and escorted by the white-haired 
old verger, to whom his silver stick was more significant of authority 
than the sceptre of a despot, Pearl’s father entered the cathedral 
pulpit, and Bertie Meredith prepared himself to listen to the sermon. 

“ Is there not a cause?” 

These were the words which the archdeacon gave out as his text, 
and to each of the three men with whose fortunes this story has to 
do they came home with a peculiar and individual emphasis, which 
made the question one of deep personal import. To the rich man 
whose life to himself seemed such a dismal failure, while by others 
counted as a brilliant success, it opened up a whole world of secret 
regret guessed at by none, and hitherto unsolaced by any soothing 
influence, any loving sympathy. 

And to the young aristocrat with the unlovely body and the lov- 
ing heart, the half-mocking intellect and the shrinking, sensitive soul, 
it bore another message, hinting at some future solution of the hard 
riddle called Life, which should reconcile all its bitter contradictions, 
and reveal the end and aim of its torturing yet nameless sorrows. 

And yet, again, to the youthful disciple, to the student of material 
forces and inanimate matter, the words were full of meaning. For 
in Hector’s mind, at once active and wholesome and honest, had 
arisen that question with regard to revelation which in some form 
or other, whether practical or theoretical, presents itself to every 
thinking soul — the question, “Are these things so?” 

Perhaps he only of the three listened with an intellectual interest 
to Dr. Merryweather’s masterly treatment of his theme. Such doubts 
as the young man had harbored as yet respecting the authenticity of 
his mother’s creed had in no sense slackened his feelings of respon- 
sibility towards Him whom his mother had taught him to worship. 
His heart was unwounded still, for “the spirit that denies” had not 
yet found out the joints of his armor. 

As for Pearl, it might be said of her that to-day she heard her 
father with new ears. She knew that he had the reputation of be- 
ing an able preacher ; but no words of his had ever yet penetrated 
beyond those “outward ears,” which are all that most of us bring 
to bear upon a sermon. 

What he said was doubtless true, but it usually seemed to her that 
she knew it already. To-day, seeing Hector interested, she pricked 
up her own ears, and listened with surprised attention to a discourse 
which, viewed in the light of an appeal on behalf of missions, had at 
least the merit of daring novelty. For, instead of adopting the or- 


110 


THE PRICE OF A PEARL 


dinary method, and defending by threadbare arguments a system 
which needs no defence, the archdeacon carried the war into the 
enemy’s camp, and boldly challenged the world to account for the 
existence of a fact which it could not deny. 

“You never told me that your father could preach like that.” 

Hector whispered these words in Pearl’s ear, as she moved in the 
wake of the crowd along the narrow passage of the side aisle while 
he followed at her elbow. 

“ I didn’t know it myself,” she answered, a little more seriously 
than usual, for the sermon had given her something to think about. 

“ I could go and hear him every week,” continued the young man, 
with genuine enthusiasm. “ If there were more sermons like that 
the churches would be fuller.” 

“ Perhaps they would, but all the same the people would go away 
and forget, as they will to-day — as I do always.” 

“I don’t think I could ' forget to-day,” said Hector, very quietly, 
but very emphatically. 

She glanced back at him over her shoulder, and their eyes met in 
silent understanding. 

“ ‘ Is there not a cause ?’ ” he murmured, half under his breath, as 
if to himself ; but she knew what the words meant on his lips, and 
a gentle sigh was her answer. 

It was not possible that Lord Bertie could overhear this conversa- 
tion, but he was evidently unwilling to lose sight of the speakers; 
for the organist, who usually found him the most prompt and effi- 
cient of assistants in the matter of pulling out stops and turning 
over pages, was obliged to-day to dispense with his aid, and felt 
himself cruelly handicapped in consequence. 

Long before he had brought his voluntary to an end, Lord Bertie 
had deserted the organ-loft, and was mingling with the crowd in the 
body of the church. His lengthy limbs stood him in good stead 
with regard to making his exit, and enabled him to reach the door 
just in time to witness Pearl’s start of undisguised astonishment at 
the unexpected vision of Mr. Bartholomew Lewis. And, as he fur- 
ther observed the gloomy expression of baffled purpose and angry 
disappointment to which this unwelcome apparition gave birth on 
Hector’s telltale countenance, the humorous Bertie was forcibly re- 
minded of the archdeacon’s text, and murmured to himself, with a 
half-unconscious sigh of compassion : 

“ ‘ Is there not a cause ?’ ” 


CHAPTER III 


THE SKELETON IN THE CUPBOARD 

“ There are natures in which, if they love us, we are conscious of receiving a 
sort of baptism of consecration, and our sins become that worst kind of sacri- 
lege which tears down the invisible altar of trust.” 

“You have taken us by surprise,” said Pearl, going forward to 
meet the new-comer with as good a grace as she could assume at 
such inconveniently short notice. 

In spite of his defective vision, Mr. Lewis discerned that the sight 
of him was scarcely welcome, and his heart sank. 

“ It was a piece of stupidity on my part,” he explained, as bash- 
fully as if he had been a boy in his teens, rather than a grave mid- 
dle-aged man verging on forty years. “ My letter was not posted in 
time last night. It will probably reach you to-morrow morning.” 

“ I suppose Aunt Cecilia told you where to find me?” 

The girl’s tone and manner were still a little less gracious than he 
was wont to find them, and had he been a vainer man than his worst 
enemy could have pronounced him, he must even so have felt pain- 
fully that she was not glad to see him. 

Yet, sooner or later, she had known that he would come, and that 
she had only herself to thank for his coming. But this day was to 
have been marked in her calendar with a red letter, and now all the 
brightness seemed to have gone out of it. 

Almost with the air of a culprit he proceeded to explain his er- 
rand, adding that Lady Dairy mple had held out some hope of there 
being no other engagement. 

“ Thank you very much. It is very kind of you, but of course I 
can’t answer for my father. We are waiting for him.” 

Pearl looked round as she spoke with a touch of that restlessness 
which Bertie had remarked on the night of the fancy-ball. 

Mr. Lewis followed her eyes, and became aware for the first time 
of the presence of Mrs. Fursden, who, assisted by Hector, was in the 
act of stepping into her bath-chair. 

“ Aunt Emily, this is Mr. Lewis,” said Pearl, a little nervously, for 


112 


THE PRICE OF A PEARL 


the near neighborhood of the man whom she felt to be his rival made 
her self-conscious. 

“ I have often heard of Mr. Lewis,” said Mrs. Fursden, with a gra- 
cious smile which presented a marked contrast to that fitful gleam of 
artificial teeth bestowed on him a little while ago by Pearl’s other 
relative. “ My niece has told me how much her brother owes to your 
kindness. Indeed, we must all feel grateful for it.” 

“I’m afraid Miss Merry weather has exaggerated it, and some 
people might think a three-legged stool anything but a comfortable 
seat. Still, I sat on it myself for some years, and I’m not sorry to 
have had the experience.” 

He spoke kindly and simply, and Mrs. Fursden’s first favorable im- 
pression was distinctly confirmed. 

“ I hope my nephew will have the good sense to stick to it,” she 
said, with an affectionately humorous glance at Pearl which at once 
captivated both Pearl’s lovers. 

“ Oh,” thought Lewis, regretfully, “ if only this woman had had 
the bringing-up of her instead of the other !” 

“ What an awfully nice old lady !” reflected Hector. “ I feel quite 
at home with her already, but I wish she’d send the other fellow 
about his business.” 

Looking up at the same moment, he found “ the other fellow’s ” 
eyes fixed on him with an expression of puzzled scrutiny, which pres- 
ently gave place to a sort of hesitating recognition. 

“ I think we have met before and Lewis held out his hand with the 
awkwardness that betokens want of sight more than want of manners. 

The young man took it with so little cordiality as to give an erro- 
neous impression that he was offended. 

Mr. Lewis hastened to apologize. 

“My eyes are always getting me into trouble,” he explained, 
courteously. “If I don’t speak to the right man, I am almost 
certain to nod to the wrong one, and latterly I have become rather 
shy of either speaking or nodding. You will excuse my stupidity ?” 

Hector, whose stiffness was caused rather by jealousy than by any 
personal soreness, reddened uneasily, and said he was sure Mr. Lewis 
had not meant to cut him. 

“ Far from it, indeed ; but I am ashamed to say I don’t know your 
name now.” 

“ I ought to have introduced you,” interposed Pearl, before Hec- 
tor could answer this most uncomfortable of all questions. “Mr. 
MacAdam, Mr. Lewis.” 


THE SKELETON IN THE CUPBOARD 


113 


“ MacAdam ?” repeated the banker, thoughtfully. “ I ought to 
know that name.” 

“ Of Adamscourt,” continued Pearl. “ Perhaps you know the name 
in connection with the place ?” 

“ I am afraid I can’t trace the connection, but the name is 
familiar to me. However, Mr. MacAdam will pardon me, I hope, 
for my apparent want of manners, and not wait to be recognized in 
future.” 

But before Hector could give the required assurance, the arch- 
deacon joined the group, shook hands all round with the curiously 
impersonal benevolence which characterized him, and asked his 
daughter whether she had driven over with Mr. Lewis. 

“ Papa dear,” remonstrated poor Pearl, blushing painfully at the 
extreme awkwardness of this question. “I came here with you, 
don’t you remember?” 

“To be sure, my love! Of course. Of course. You wanted to 
meet some one, if I remember rightly.” 

Dr. Merry weather’s absence of mind was occasionally disquieting 
to those about him. No one knew how much he grasped, or how 
much he failed to grasp, of any situation not immediately connected 
with his professional duties. 

He would inquire blandly after dead relatives, divorced wives, and 
runaway children ; but on the other hand he would come out occa- 
sionally with some piece of information — quite correct, indeed, but 
so gratuitous and so fearfully ill-timed or misplaced, as to make his 
hearers alternately hot and cold with a helpless dismay, not wholly 
free from some secret amusement. 

The present was a case in point ; and Pearl would willingly have 
sunk into the ground as she answered, desperately : 

“ I wanted to see Aunt Emily, and Mr. Lewis wants you and me 
to dine with him this evening. I didn’t know if you could.” 

What would she not have given to hear him say decidedly that he 
could not ! 

But, alas for Hector’s hopes and her own peace of mind, it turned 
out that, for once in his life, the archdeacon had no prior engage- 
ment, and took rather kindly than otherwise to the idea of dining on 
the water. 

“ Well, then, that is settled,” said Mrs. Fursden ; “ and now you 
must all come and have tea with me. Mr. Lewis, will you walk 
beside my chair?” 

A feeling of intense compassion for poor Hector induced her to 


114 


THE PRICE OF A PEARL 


make this request, and she was rewarded by a grateful smile from 
Pearl as the little carriage was wheeled up the incline leading to the 
square. 

The youth and maiden, being left to themselves, fell back a few 
paces in silence, and for some moments neither spoke. 

“It’s all up with the song, I suppose?” said Hector, at last, with 
an air of gloomy resignation. 

“Oh no ; I don’t mind him at all. He does not dislike music.” 

Pearl tried to speak cheerfully, but her heart was heavy with dis- 
appointment. 

“Doesn’t dislike music!” echoed Hector, bitterly. “ How conde- 
scending of him !” 

“He may like it, for aught I know. I have never heard him 
speak of it.” 

It came upon her with a chill feeling of dismay, as she spoke, how 
little she knew, after all, what Mr. Lewis liked or did not like, over 
and above his pet schemes for regenerating the masses, and his 
persistent passion for herself. This much, however, she did know, 
that between them both there was nothing in the nature of that 
camaraderie which, more even than suitability in age or family or 
fortune, insures happiness in marriage. Try as she might, respect 
him as she did, she could never feel at home with Mr. Lewis. And 
how much older-looking he was than she had fancied him a few 
weeks back ! His hair was grayer, and there was less of it, and she 
could discern the beginning of a stoop in his spare form as he 
walked on in front with her father; the result, she said to herself a 
little impatiently, of perpetually bending over long rows of figures. 

Hector broke in on her reflections with one of his abrupt ques- 
tions. 

“ Will he stay long?” 

“ In Fingall ? I don’t know.” 

“ I thought he had done all his business when he was here before.” 

“ Perhaps he has not come on business this time,” said Pearl, with 
a nervous little laugh born of self-consciousness. 

“Or perhaps he has come on the most important business of 
all?” 

Hector paused in his walk and faced her, but her eyes refused to 
meet his. 

“ He would be flattered, I am sure, if he knew what an interest 
you took in his movements. Come, we must not lag behind. They 
are a long way ahead of us already.” 


THE SKELETON IN THE CUPBOARD 


115 


“Must we go in at once? I thought we could have walked here 
for a little while before the tea was ready ?” 

They were in St. Bridget’s Place by this time, and, in spite of its 
weedy paths and rusty railings, it looked pretty and inviting to both 
of them, for it was enchanted ground. 

“What will Aunt Emily say?” asked Pearl, dubiously; but she 
stood still, nevertheless, as if she were open to persuasion. 

“ She will say nothing, for she understands. She understood that 
first morning, when I listened outside the window.” 

“And what will Mr. Lewis say?” said Pearl, after a pause, just 
long enough to be significant. 

“ What right has he to say anything ?” 

There was a flash in the young man’s eyes as he put this direct 
question, and she winced as if a blow had been dealt her. It was 
not the first time — no, nor the second — that she had been made to 
feel ignoble in her own eyes by some such unconscious look or gest- 
ure as this from the man who yet held her to be above reproach. 

If he ever came to think of her as she sometimes thought of her- 
self, God help her! She had feared lest Lord Bertie should open his 
eyes, and she was afraid even now of Mrs. Mandeville’s unscrupulous 
tongue, but more than either did the girl dread her own weakness, 
and yearn to be shielded from it by the strength of that “ child’s 
heart” which suspected no evil, notwithstanding the indignant query, 
“ What right has he to say anything?” 

“ I did not say he had any right,” said Pearl, but her manner was 
lighter than her heart at that moment. 

“Then it does not matter what he may say. Look, there is a 
dear little seat over there under the laburnums ! Might we not go 
and sit down first for five minutes ? The tea has got to draw, you 
know, and Mrs. Fursden is only getting out of her chair now.” 

She looked as he bade her, and perceived that her aunt was as he 
said only just entering her own house. Her father was probably al- 
ready in the drawing-room earnestly discussing some ecclesiastical 
question with Mr. Lewis, and certainly oblivious of her very exist- 
ence. And the tea had “got to draw!” Yes, for five minutes she 
would let herself sit with Hector under the laburnums and be happy. 

“ I have forgotten to ask after your patient,” she observed, with a 
carelessness which an older and less guileless lover would have known 
to spell jealousy. “ Have you allowed her to go home yet?” 

“ How do you mean ?” and Hector looked so genuinely puzzled 
that the girl felt ashamed of having put the question. 


i 


116 


THE PRICE OF A PEARL 


“ We were told that her doctor had ordered her to keep quiet, 
and so we supposed, of course, that she was carrying out your ad- 
vice, when we heard she was staying on at Lowick Head.” 

“Surely she didn’t say I had forbidden her to go home?” said the 
young man, as seriously as if he were disproving some grave person- 
al charge against his professional character. 

Pearl smiled at the delicious earnestness of his manner, and as- 
sured him she was only joking. 

“But you did set her arm, didn’t you, and the Fingall surgeon 
was quite satisfied with your work, isn’t that so?” 

“ Oh yes, but you know it was not much of an accident, Miss 
Merry weather ; I’ve done more ticklish jobs than that before now. 
Still, it was satisfactory to hear that I hadn’t blundered.”’ 

“ It was lucky for her that you were on the spot,” remarked 
Pearl, as coolly as if she had not till quite recently looked upon it as 
anything but lucky for herself. 

“ So she is kind enough to say, and I suppose it did make some 
little difference to have the arm set at once, instead of driving back 
to Fingall. But that’s not what I wanted to talk to you about.” 

Hector paused for a moment or two, and looked so evidently em- 
barrassed that all her latent and jealous misgivings revived in full 
force. 

“I suppose,” she observed, quietly, “that Mrs. Mandeville has 
been telling you her history ?” 

“Well, yes, she has told me a little. Of course one can see she 
is rather desolate, and 1 feel awfully sorry for her, but I wasn’t think- 
ing of her troubles when I asked you to come and sit down here.” 

Pearl’s face brightened so instantaneously that he must have no- 
ticed it if he had not been nervously engaged in pulling one of the 
laburnum pods to pieces. 

“'Whose troubles were you thinking of?” she asked him, gently. 

* “ My own,” he answered, with boyish simplicity. “ It worries me 
that you should have heard of what I was doing up here from any 
one except myself.” 

She was very glad then that she had consented to stay out with 
him for those five minutes. 

“I was sorry that you had not trusted me,” she said, her face 
aglow with bashful pleasure, and her tone tender with a reproach 
that set his heart beating. 

“ It was not that,” he explained, eagerly, “ but I feel rather 
shackled in the matter, especially here where I am known. My fa- 


117 


,-THE SKELETON IN THE CUPBOARD 

ther knows what I am doing, but I’m afraid he does not much like 
my doing it, and it seemed better to say nothing in a place where 
people are so fond of discussing their neighbors’ affairs.” 

“You betrayed yourself,” said Pearl, gayly. “You were like a 
war-horse scenting the battle from afar when you heard that there 
had been an accident.” 

“ What did Lady Dalrymple say ? Is she vexed ?” 

“ Not so much vexed as astonished, I think. She does not pro- 
fess to understand you. She says that in her day the heir of Adams- 
court would not have found his pastime in a dissecting-room.” 

“ Probably not,” said Hector, rather dryly. “ I should fancy that 
in her day the heir to Adamscourt was treated as the heir, not as an 
interloper who was waiting for dead men’s shoes.” 

Pearl looked her astonishment, and for some moments there was 
silence. 

“ I speak bitterly,” said the young man, “ but perhaps if you 
knew all you would say I had a right to feel bitterly.” 

“ And would you rather I did not know ?” she asked, softly. 

“Perhaps you do know something. I believe that my father’s 
indifference towards me was common property at Oxford.” 

“I have heard — since you ask me — that you and your father 
did not get on, but somehow I never thought it could be your 
fault.” 

“ I don’t know whose fault it is, but I’m ready to swear it’s not 
mine. We do not get on, as you say. And since my mother died 
I have found it impossible to live at home. Of course people talk. 
It seems odd that the only son shouldn’t live at home, and look 
after what is likely to be his in the ordinary course of events. But 
my father resents my taking the smallest interest in the place, and I 
simply can’t live in his house as a state prisoner on parole .” 

“ No !” exclaimed Pearl, indignantly. “ I don’t see how he could 
expect it.” 

“ Ought I not to say all this to you ? Is it disloyal of me ? Ber- 
tie Meredith knows something. He could see for himself, but I 
have never spoken about it to any one else.” 

“ I hope that you do not repent of having spoken to me ?” she 
answered, wistfully. 

“ It is not, you understand, that there is any quarrel between iny 
father and me. If there had been, I don’t know that I could have 
borne to speak of it even to you. It is simply, as far as I can judge 
by his manner, that my very existence is an offence to him.” 


118 


THE PRICE OF A PEARL 


“ And was he always like that?” inquired Pearl, sympathetically. 

“ Ever since I can remember him, but I don’t remember him at 
all until I was nearly fourteen. We were born out in India, and I 
wasn’t more than five when I was sent home.” 

“ And did you never see your mother all that time ?” 

“ Oh yes, thank God I did. She was at home for two years, and 
I have always that to look back to.” 

“ Well, and then, when did your father come back?” 

“He didn’t come back for good till he got Adamscourt four years 
ago, when I was in my first term at Oxford. He had been backward 
and forward before that, and I had found out already that I was no 
favorite with him.” 

“That must have been very sad for your mother,” exclaimed Pearl, 
with a quiver of womanly compassion in her voice that would have 
amazed even Mrs. Fursden. 

“ I think she felt it — she must have felt it — but she said nothing. 
To the day of her death her lips were sealed.” 

Hector paused for a moment. She did not look at him, but she 
knew that his face was working. 

“Would you rather not tell me anything more?” she asked, in a 
whisper. 

“ No ; I want you to know the rest. Before my cousin died, of 
course I supposed I should follow some profession like every one else, 
and I wanted to go to India, but my father interfered. That was the 
first serious difference between us, for he seemed to me unreasonable. 
He gave no grounds for his objections, and yet they were invincible. 
I yielded that point by my mother’s advice, and then I went to Ox- 
ford. A few months later my cousin died, and my father came in 
for Adamscourt. People spoke of it as a piece of good-fortune, and 
I suppose I thought so myself at one time, but the place doesn’t 
seem to have brought us much luck. First my poor brother was 
drowned. That seemed to imbitter my father still more against me, 
though I couldn’t blame myself for it in any way. Then Bertie got 
diphtheria.” 

“And you nursed him through it?” she interrupted, in a tone of 
pride which might have elated a less single-minded lover. 

“ Well, I did,” he said, simply. “ He would have done as much 
for me any day ; but however, as ill-luck would have it, I caught it 
from him, and my father and mother came to Oxford, as they 
thought, to see me die.” 

Again he paused, and again her maidenly instinct bade her avert 


THE SKELETON IN THE CUPBOARD 


119 


her eyes from the sight of some sharp inward anguish of the sort 
that a man of his stamp cannot endure to reveal even to the woman 
whom he loves. His words came at last, but they sounded as if they 
were being dragged out of him. 

“ After all, it was my mother who died.” 

“ Oh, how terrible for you, how terrible !” 

“ It was terrible. Sometimes I wonder that I can ever bear to go 
in and out as I used, and laugh at jokes and take pleasure in life, 
when I remember that time and all that came after.” 

“She caught the illness from you?” 

He nodded silently. 

“ I did not know it at first. They kept it from me — her death, I 
mean. And my father was awfully good to me then, when it seemed 
that I was going to die myself. Bertie has told me about it. I was 
hardly conscious at the time.” 

“ Then he does care for you. He must, surely, or he would not 
have done that ?” 

“ So Bertie says. I wish I could think so. But to me it seems 
that my life was the one not wanted. However, here I am, and I 
must do something; and as I had a fancy for surgery, I got him to 
consent at last to my going in for it.” 

“ But do you never mean to live at home again ?” 

“ I would throw up everything to-morrow and live with him al- 
ways if he wanted me, but he never does.” 

“And are things always to go on like that between you?” she 
asked, anxiously. 

“ I don’t know ; but one thing I do know, and that is that I must 
come to some definite understanding with him about my future. I 
had not thought much about it till lately, but now — ” 

“ If you please, miss, Mrs. Fursden says she’s afraid as how the 
tea ’ll be overdrawed if you don’t come in soon, miss.” 

A small, neatly-clad maid delivered this message in trembling ac- 
cents; but had it been uttered in a voice of thunder, Pearl could not 
have started to her feet with a guiltier air. The five minutes had be- 
come five-and-twenty, and oh ! what would Mr. Lewis say, or think 
if he did not say ? 

In embarrassed silence they followed the small abigail across the 
square ; but just as they neared the door he hung back for the frac- 
tion of a second. 

“ Miss Merry weather, you won’t tell him of what I am doing up 
here ?” 


120 


THE PRICE OF A PEARL 


“ Certainly not, if you don’t wish it ; but he may hear it from 
others.” 

“ And you will tell no one, will you, of the skeleton in my cup- 
board ? I don’t know why I have told you, unless — ” 

Their eyes met, and his tongue halted. What need to speak if she 
understood him ? 

“ Don’t be sorry for having told me,” she whispered, tenderly. 
“You may trust me; indeed you may.” 

How often afterwards he remembered those words, and the way in 
which she uttered them. And, alas ! he did not know that, though 
she bade him trust her, she did not trust herself, nor had she ever 
fully trusted any one. 


CHAPTER IV 


SOME ONE ELSE 

“ I sail on a wide sea of ignorance, but I have taken soundings of some of its 
shallows, and some of its depths.” 

“ So this is the young lady ?” 

Such, rather to the dismay of his nephew, was Uncle Christopher’s 
first observation when he shook hands with Pearl Merry weather. The 
words seemed to take so much for granted, and to imply so much 
previous discussion, that the younger Lewis could not help betraying 
his disapproval of them by a slight frown, which Pearl detected with 
secret amusement. The old gentleman, however, received it with 
shrewdly twinkling eyes (he was evidently an enfant terrible ), and 
then turning again to the girl, he observed, good-humoredly : 

“ My nephew here would like me to pretend that I had never heard 
of you, but I don’t suppose you are to be taken in quite so easily as 
that, are you ?” 

“ I’ve certainly heard of Uncle Christopher,” replied Pearl, with 
an audacity which she felt instinctively was much more likely to 
please that eccentric individual than any of the ordinary blandish- 
ments or feminine wiles that most girls would have employed under 
similar circumstances. 

“ What have you heard of him ?” demanded the old man, abruptly. 

He looked not unlike a benevolent wizard, with his piercing eyes 
and shaggy brows, to say nothing of the red fez that covered his 
white hair. The background of a civilized drawing-room would not 
have suited him half so well as this romantic one of a stormy sunset 
and lurid sky, against which the barge stood out in sharp relief, like 
some unearthly vessel freighted with phantom passengers. 

“ W T hat have you heard of Uncle Christopher, eh ?” 

“For one thing, that he is a woman-hater,” retorted the girl, 
gayly. 

“ Pearl, my dear,” remonstrated the archdeacon, aghast at such 
freedom. 


122 


TI1E PRICE OF A PEARL 


“ Will Mr. Lewis deny it ?” and Pearl looted up in the old man’s 
face with a sweet sauciness which would scarcely have left even a 
genuine misogynist altogether proof against her charms. And Mr. 
Lewis’s hatred of her sex was by no means genuine, as she was not 
slow to discover. 

“ I was Uncle Christopher a minute ago. Hadn’t you better stick 
to that?” he said, returning her challenge with a grim smile of satis- 
faction which rejoiced his nephew’s heart. It was pretty plain that 
these two were going to understand each other ; and Bartholomew 
Lewis, who had felt a little nervous as to the impression that Pearl 
was likely to produce on the old gentleman, perceived, with an inde- 
scribable relief, that his fears had been groundless. 

“ I only said it in inverted commas,” she replied, laughingly, “ but 
I felt that I knew you quite well before I saw you, and I always get 
on well with woman-haters.” 

“Because they make an exception in your favor, is that it?” 

“I suppose that must be it; I never asked myself why before.” 

“Well, you’re honest at all events, and that’s more than most of 
your sex are. However, we don’t have ladies to dine with us every 
day, so I suppose I mustn’t say anything worse than what you have 
heard already, or Bat won’t bring you here again.” 

“ Then you would like me to come again ?” said the girl, some- 
what coquettishly, it must be admitted, for she could not but know 
that she was on slippery ground in coming here at all, and that it 
behooved her to walk warily if she was not to be false at once to Bar- 
tholomew Lewis, to Hector MacAdam, and to her own newly-awak- 
ened heart. 

The words revealed more of her character than she guessed, and old 
Christopher looked at her for a moment with gravely penetrating eyes. 

“ I’ll tell you at the end of the evening,” he said, dryly, and turned 
aside with one of his abruptest gestures to address some common- 
place observation to Dr. Merry weather. 

“ You must not mind my uncle,” whispered Lewis, drawing her 
away to the other side of the boat, on the plausible pretext of show- 
ing her the view. “ He is in the habit of saying exactly what he 
thinks, but no man ever lived who was more chivalrous at heart to 
your sex, whatever he may vow to the contrary.” 

But, although Pearl laughingly disclaimed all idea of being offend- 
ed at the old gentleman’s plain speaking, she was not wholly at her 
ease with his nephew, and there was an evident effort about her man- 
ner which he did not fail to recognize. 


SOME ONE ELSE 


123 


She was unusually silent at dinner, leaving the conversation mainly 
to her father, who had always plenty to say on his own subject, 
and was never loath to talk if he could get hold of an intelligent 
listener. 

It was a fact, however, that the archdeacon in the pulpit and the 
archdeacon in private life were two distinct individuals, and Pearl’s 
lover was conscious of a certain degree of disappointment. He could 
not, perhaps, have accounted for this on any reasonable grounds, 
but the sermon of the afternoon had led him to expect a spirituality 
of mind and a singleness of aim which he did not find when he 
came to close quarters with the preacher. Dr. Merryweatber was a 
very zealous churchman and a very skilled theologian ; but to save 
souls was no part of his office as he conceived of it. Under these 
circumstances, it was not perhaps surprising that his own children 
were strangers to him. 

“ No wonder that the son is a scapegrace,” reflected old Mr. Lewis, 
shrewdly, long before the evening was over, “ and as for the girl, I 
believe I know more about her myself this minute than he does, or 
ever will.” 

Looking up from her plate at that moment, Pearl encountered his 
keen eyes fixed upon her with an expression of almost paternal inter- 
est in them. 

“Young lady,” he observed, smilingly, “I’m afraid all this eccle- 
siastical talk is boring you.” 

“To tell the truth,” replied Pearl, lightly, “I wasn’t listening to 
it just then, I was thinking of something else.” 

“Or perhaps of some one else?” suggested Uncle Christopher, in 
a mischievous undertone ; and as he noted the faint tinge of color 
produced by this innuendo, he said to himself, decisively : 

“ There is some one else.” 

“ I was thinking of the sermon I had heard this afternoon, if you 
particularly wish to know,” she said, with feminine presence of mind, 
if also feminine reservation of the whole truth. 

“ Humph ! I hope you will act upon it.” 

“ It wasn’t practical,” Pearl explained, demurely. “ It was what 
people would call controversial.” 

“ And what has a young lady like you to do with controversy ?” 
inquired the old gentleman, rather dryly. 

The consciousness that her interest in the subject was of very re- 
cent date, and also that it was derived rather than inherent, caused 
Pearl’s faint flush to deepen into a vivid blush, and made her laugh 


124 


THE PRICE OF A PEARL 


a little forced, as she answered that in these days every one was sup- 
posed to dabble with controversy in some form or other. 

“ So much the worse,” retorted Bat’s uncle, with crusty energy. 
“Your dabblers are a curse to the country, and your controversies 
are sapping the heart out of honest conviction. Bah ! I wish, for 
my part, that you young things would make up your minds as to 
what you believe, and stick to it, and not be in such a mighty hurry 
to prate of what you disbelieve !” 

“ But have I been prating?” asked Pearl, in her most dulcet accents. 

Old Mr. Lewis burst out laughing, and his nephew paused for a 
moment in his interested discussion with the archdeacon, and even 
lost the thread of his argument in the vain attempt to discover the 
cause of the old gentleman’s unwonted merriment. 

What was his amazement to overhear these words, 

“ No, my dear, you haven’t been prating ; but evidently I’ve been 
prosing, or you would never have set me down so neatly. Come, 
we will leave these two to settle the affairs of the Church between 
them, and you and I will take a stroll on shore.” 

“ We will join you presently,” said the archdeacon, politely im- 
patient of his younger host’s wandering attention, and anxious to 
resume his own discourse without fear of further interruption. 

“ There’s no hurry,” replied old Christopher, bluntly, as he gave 
his hand to Pearl, to assist her up the steep little staircase leading 
to the deck. “ I’ll take very good care of her.” 

“ Much better than papa himself ever would,” said the girl, half 
mirthfully, but also half wistfully. “ He doesn’t even remember that 
I am with him sometimes.” 

But the archdeacon was again deep in his subject, and Pearl’s 
rallying speech was lost on him. 

“ And so you have no mother?” said Uncle Christopher, after the 
lapse of some minutes, in which they had left the barge and begun 
to explore the unknown territory of the towing-path. 

“ I don’t even remember her.” 

“That’s his case too,” and the old gentleman jerked his thumb 
backward over his shoulder in the supposed direction of Bartholo- 
mew. “ His mother died when he was born, and his father not long 
after.” 

“ He has told me,” said Pearl, gently, “ that you have been father 
and mother in one to him.” 

“And he might have told you, if he liked, that he was son and 
daughter to me.” 


SOME ONE ELSE 


125 


“ I can see that you are everything to each other.” 

“Nay,” said Uncle Christopher, gravely. “Not that, my dear. 
He is not the first with me, but he is the second. I am neither first 
nor second with him.” 

Pearl was silent. She understood well enough what was implied 
in the old man’s words, but her heart did not respond to them. 

Touched, interested, and flattered as she was at once by what he 
said and by what he left unsaid, she could not deceive herself as to 
the real nature of her feeling for his nephew. If Hector had done 
nothing else, he had made it impossible for her to marry Mr. Lewis. 

“Has he ever told you anything about himself?” demanded Uncle 
Christopher, perceiving that no answer was forthcoming to his last 
words. 

“ Not much. He has spoken now and then of his work, and 
things of that sort.” 

“ Which probably don’t interest you ?” said the old man, with one 
of his shrewd smiles. 

“Oh yes, they do; but I am afraid I know very little about 
them. 

“ I wish he worked less, for my part. He is burning the candle 
at both ends, but what can I do ?” 

“What can any one do?” said Pearl, lightly, “if he insists on 
overworking himself?” 

“ He wouldn’t if he had the home interests of other men. He 
took up philanthropy in the first instance as a refuge from a sore 
heart, and now it has become second nature with him ; but it hasn’t 
cured him, though I hoped it would.” 

“ A sore heart,” repeated Pearl, musingly ; and her thoughts went 
back to something that Mr. Lewis had said to her in the fernery that 
evening — was it only one short month ago ? — when he had asked 
her to be his wife : “ Let me have your sympathy, at least, if I can- 
not have your love.” 

And she had been ready enough to give it to him then — but 
now ? How had the face of the world been changed for her since 
then ! She knew now that sympathy and love cannot be divorced. 

“Aye!” said Uncle Christopher, sharply. “You wouldn’t have 
given him credit for it, eh ?” 

“ I knew he was not happy and unconsciously she sighed as she 
spoke. Was any one really happy who had once left childhood behind ? 

“Nor ever will be,” replied Uncle Christopher, and thereupon re- 
lapsed into silence. 


126 


THE TRICE OF A PEARL 


Not until the walk and the evening were alike over did he permit 
himself any further allusion to that of which, as he knew well, her 
thoughts were as full as his own. 

Drawing her aside for a moment, as she was about to get into the 
carriage which had been ordered to convey her and her father back 
to Fingall, the old gentleman said, meaningly : 

“You asked me a question, my dear, before dinner, and I prom- 
ised to answer it.” 

“ You made me so ashamed of having asked it,” replied Pearl, 
rather hastily, “ that I think I would rather you didn’t answer it.” 

“You spoke in jest, my dear.* I knew that, but I took you 
up in earnest; and I am in earnest now when I say that it rests 
with you, not with either of us, whether you come again as you 
said.” 

“ At least, I am glad that I came to-night;” and Pearl looked up 
at him with her bewitching smile, as she held out her hand to bid 
good-bye. 

“ God bless you, my dear !” he said, kindly ; but his heart was 
heavy, and his eyes were moist as the carriage drove away. 

For some minutes after the sound of its retreating wheels had 
died into the stillness of the fair summer night the two men kept 
silence, each being equally nervous, apparently, of committing him- 
self to definite speech. 

“ It has been a pleasant evening,” said the younger at last, taking 
refuge, as men often do, in a vague generality. 

“ Glad you found it so,” retorted the uncle, dryly. “ That Eli of 
an archdeacon would drive me distracted, but tastes differ.” 

“You ought to be obliged to me, sir, for taking him off your 
hands,” said Lewis, with his quiet smile. 

“ I suppose I ought, for most men would have envied me.” 

“ I don’t fancy you pitied yourself.” 

“ Maybe not, maybe not, but I shall pity you, my boy, unless 
you can manage to get her out of your head.” 

The die was cast now. Uncle Christopher had fairly committed 
himself, and awaited the issue with an inward trepidation whose 
only outward sign consisted in the trembling of his hands and the 
occasional twitching of his lips. 

“ You have some reason, I suppose,” said Lewis, composedly, “ for 
what you say ?” 

I usually have a reason for what I say, and you may believe me 
when I tell you that there’s no chance for you.” 


SOME ONE ELSE 127 

“ In a matter of this sort, Uncle Kit, every man must judge for 
himself.” 

“ In a matter of this sort, my dear Bat, outsiders see most of the 
game. I can see what you can’t or won’t — that she is thinking of 
some one else.” 

“ There was no one else,” cried Lewis, with an irrepressible ac- 
cent of pain in his voice that went to the old man’s heart — “ there 
was no one else when I saw her last. She told me so herself.” 

“ That’s more than a month ago, and a lot of mischief may be 
done in a month, let me tell you, more than a lifetime can undo.” 

“But why do you think so? What has she said?” and even as 
he spoke he remembered what had happened in the square that very 
afternoon, and saw vividly with his mind’s eye the two young faces 
— bashful yet elated, humble yet triumphant, which had appeared 
in the doorway in answer to Mrs. Fursden’s summons. 

“ Bless you, lad ! she has said nothing, but I have used my eyes, 
and there’s a look in hers you can’t mistake if you have once seen it.” 

“ I haven’t seen it,” said the younger man, a little doggedly. 

“You may if you look for it,” and with these words Uncle 
Christopher betook himself to his cabin. 

For hours afterwards he could hear his nephew walking up and 
down the boat’s length, with the steady, measured tread of a senti- 
nel on guard. 

It was long past midnight before the sound came to an end, and 
Bat’s white face suddenly appeared in the narrow doorway. 

“ How do I know the name of MacAdam ?” he asked, briefly. 

The old man sat up in his berth and considered. 

“ MacAdam ! Let me see. Surely that was. the name of the 
man who ran away with poor Blanche’s sister ?” 

“Of course! I knew I had some painful association with it. 
She had children, hadn’t she?” 

“ A couple of boys, I believe. They would be grown up by this 
time.” 

“I wonder what became of her? You never heard — I suppose 

after?” Bartholomew stammered, hesitated, and finally came to a 

full stop. 

Uncle Christopher shook his head sadly. 

“ The sister was in India at the time of poor Blanche’s death.” 

“ What MacAdam was he ? Have you any idea ?” 

“ He was in the Indian Civil Service, I never heard more than 
that; but why do you ask?” 


128 


THE PRICE OF A PEARL 


“ I met some one of the name this afternoon, and it set me think- 
ing, that’s all. Good-night, sir.” 

Bat Uncle Christopher wa$ shrewd enough to know that that was 
not all. The name alone would not have set his nephew thinking, 
and his evident preoccupation had more to do with the immediate 
present or the near future than with the distant past, however 
painful. 

“ I knew there was some one else,” the old man sighed heavily 
before he fell asleep. 


CHAPTER V 


uncle Christopher’s narrative 

“ 0 Time ! thou must entangle this, not I. 

It is too hard a knot for me to untie !” 

The next morning, having got through some at least of that 
multifarious correspondence which pursued him even on his holi- 
day trip, the younger Lewis went in search of the elder and asked 
him if he felt like driving in to Fingall, to pay a visit to a lady. 

“ Bless me, lad l Don’t you know that I hate all strangers, and 
especially strange ladies ? I told you from the first that if I came 
to this place I must be kept clear of all your smart friends.” 

“ This lady is not at all smart ; I should say she was very poor. 
She certainly lives in a poor house and a poorer neighborhood.” 

“Who is she?” demanded Uncle Kit, abruptly. “ Some relative 
of the little girl who was here last night, I’ll be bound ?” 

“ She is a Mrs. Fursden, half-sister, as I understand, to the arch- 
deacon. I made her acquaintance yesterday.” 

“ And why do you want me to make it to-day ?” 

“ I feel sure you will like her,” replied Bat, rather evasively. 
“ She is a charming old lady.” 

“ You seem to have made up your mind very quickly.” 

“ So will you when you see her. She is a woman to whom you 
can say anything.” 

Here the younger Lewis lifted his eyes for a moment, and suf- 
fered his uncle to read in them a certain significant expression, 
which his quiet, emotionless Saxon voice had assuredly not man- 
aged to convey. It had the effect of making the old gentleman 
give a low whistle of intelligence. 

“ Oh, that’s it, is it ? Then why can’t you say it yourself, lad, if 
it comes to that ?” 

“ I think you could say it better, sir.” 

“ And you insist on its being said,” continued his uncle, doubt- 
fully, “ before you — ” 

9 


130 


THE PRICE OF A PEARL 


“ Before I speak again,” said Bat, decidedly. “ I can’t keep 
back my past life from her. In justice to us both, she ought to 
know.” 

“ I wondered if she did know when she was here last night. I 
thought, perhaps, that you might have told her yourself.” 

Bat shook his head, and took off his glasses which had become 
suddenly and unaccountably misty. 

“ I can’t tell her myself,” he said, presently, and his voice sounded 
a little odd and shaky as he spoke. “ I tried to once, but some- 
how the thing was impossible. She made it impossible without 
meaning to.” 

“ Do you fancy that she will be equally candid with you ?” asked 
Uncle Christopher, shrewdly but also compassionately. 

“ She will not marry me unless she cares for me,” replied the 
other, avoiding for the second time a direct answer to the old gen- 
tleman’s searching question. 

“ Well, I hope not, with all my heart. From what I have seen 
of her, I should say it would be the ruin of you both.” 

“You will come and see Mrs. Fursden?” urged Lewis; and his 
eyes, devoid of their usual sheath, looked strangely moved and even 
wistful. 

“ If you insist. But look here, lad, you’ll spare me the other old 
woman.” 

“ Oh, certainly ! She knows you are what is politely called a 
character, and she would just as soon expect a visit from an escaped 
lunatic as from my respected uncle.” 

“ A nice sort of reputation you have made for me !” remarked 
Uncle Christopher, looking half amused but slightly piqued withal 
— as misogynists of his stamp are wont to be — at being thus taken 
at his own word. 

“ Seriously,” replied Bat, “ I would much rather you did not 
meet. You could not be civil to her for five minutes together.” 

“ Well, well ! it’s better that you should regard me as an escaped 
lunatic than as a crusty old curmudgeon. Now Mrs. Fursden, I 
take it, will treat me as a Christian ?” 

“ It will be quite your own fault, sir, if she does not.” 

The matter being thus amicably arranged, uncle and nephew 
drove off together, and, much to Mrs. Fursden’s surprise, made 
their appearance in her small, barely-furnished drawing-room at 
an hour which most ladies would have voted unfashionably early. 
Bartholomew was aware of this, and apologized accordingly, but 


UNCLE CHRISTOPHER’S NARRATIVE 


131 


added that Mrs. Fursden had given him so kind a welcome the 
day before as to make him desirous of introducing his uncle 
to her. 

“ In fact, I shall leave him behind me if I may, as this is more 
his visit than mine, and I have several things to do in town.” 

“ I see I’m in safe hands, Bat,” observed the eccentric Christo- 
pher, with his customary disregard of conventional usage. “ Mrs. 
Fursden will let me know when she is tired of me, and till then 
she will be very kind to me.” 

Bat glanced half doubtfully from one to the other. He was 
never quite sure of the effect that his uncle would produce on a 
stranger by his blunt speech and abrupt manner. But on the pres- 
ent occasion Mrs. Fursden’s merry, comprehensive smile reassured 
him, while it completed the conquest which her gracious welcome 
had already made of the elder Lewis. 

“ I don’t have so many visitors,” she said, brightly, “ as to be 
very soon or very easily tired when any one is kind enough to come 
and see me.” 

Nevertheless, she was somewhat puzzled for a little while after 
Bat’s departure as to the exact motive of the old gentleman in 
paying her this visit at all. 

lie did not talk much himself, neither did he seem particularly 
interested at first in any of the various topics of conversation which 
she successively introduced for his benefit. 

Presently, however, his roving eyes lit upon a large photograph 
of Pearl Merryweather, and he asked to be allowed to look at it 
more closely. 

“ I met this young lady yesterday,” he said, after a silent scru- 
tiny of the portrait, which was a more satisfactory one than photo- 
graphs usually are. “ She is very — I was going to say pretty, but 
that’s not the word, nor handsome either.” 

“ Fascinating ?” suggested Mrs. Fursden, with a smile. 

She could well understand that if Pearl had laid herself out to 
vanquish the old gentleman, vanquished he would certainly be. 

“ Yes, fascinating. She fairly bewitched me by her pretty ways 
and her bright manners. Yet, as a general rule, I haven’t much to 
say to young ladies, and they have rather less to say to me.” 

“ Pearl is bewitching when she pleases,” said Mrs. Fursden, tak- 
ing up the photo in her turn, and looking earnestly at the girl’s 
“ shadow ” as there portrayed. 

There was something more in her face now than there had been 


132 


THE PRICE OF A PEARL 


when this likeness was taken, and Mrs. Fursden heaved an invol- 
untary sigh as she restored the frame to its place on the mantel- 
piece. 

To give pain, if not to feel it herself, seemed to be the inevitable 
destiny of a woman thus endowed with the most dangerous of all 
gifts and graces. 

“She has bewitched my nephew,” said the old gentleman, very 
gravely. 

“ So I supposed when I saw them together yesterday and 
Mrs. Fursden’s tone, as she said this, was scarcely less serious than 
his own. 

They looked at each other for some moments in significant si- 
lence, before old Mr. Lewis again took up his parable. 

“ To him, at all events, mv dear lady, I can answer for it that 
the matter is not sport ; but what about her ?” 

Mrs. Fursden hesitated. She understood now the meaning of 
the interview which had been thrust upon her, and perceived that 
the time was fast approaching when Pearl must make up her mind 
one way or the other, and let her mind be known. 

“ I think,” she said, after a moment or two, in which the old 
man watched her narrowly, “ that it is not sport to my niece either. 
She is aware of her own responsibilities.” 

“ Forgive me for asking, but has she come to you for counsel ? 
You would advise her rightly, I am certain.” 

“ I have advised her to the best of my power, without really 
knowing much of the circumstances of the case.” 

“ Most people would advise her to say ‘ yes,’ and have done 
with it. You would not do that, eh ?” 

This, with a very keen and incisive glance at her from under 
the beetling eyebrows, which might have made her flinch had she 
been less unworldly and less entirely single-minded. 

“ I would advise no woman to say ‘ yes ’ to such a question, 
unless she cared heart and soul for the man who put it to her.” 

“ Madam, shake hands !” said the old gentleman, approvingly. 
“ I wish to Heaven that you had had the bringing-up of her in- 
stead of that old lady what’s her name, who wants to sell her to 
the highest bidder.” 

“ I don’t think, Mr. Lewis, that my niece will let herself be sold.” 

“ Perhaps not, my dear lady, perhaps not ; and yet she may do 
a deal of mischief for want of knowing better before she is finally 
disposed of.” 


UNCLE CHRISTOPHER’S NARRATIVE 


133 


“ I hope not,” said Mrs. Fursden, “ with all my heart;” but her 
tone was not very sanguine as she remembered the events of yes- 
terday afternoon, and the new light in which Pearl had revealed 
herself. 

“ My nephew would get over it if she said ‘ no ’ once for all, 
and sent him about his business. 1 don’t say he isn’t hard hit ; 
but he’s a man, and he would take her refusal of him like a man. 
But if she plays fast and loose with him, and then throws him 
over for some one else, she will just break his heart, and that will 
break mine.” 

lie stopped abruptly, and his hands trembled. She noted the 
unconscious gesture with a feeling of deep pity. It revealed such 
an intense power of suffering for and through this nephew, who 
was plainly all the world to him. Meeting her compassionate eyes, 
he made an odd contortion of the lips that was perhaps intended 
for a smile, and said, sharply : 

“ I’m an old fool, I know, but — he’s all I’ve got.” 

“ No one can sympathize with you more than I,” she answered, 
very gently, “ who for many years have had no one.” 

“ Yes, he’s all I’ve got,” continued Mr. Lewis, speaking as much 
to himself as to her, “ and his mother was the only woman I ever 
loved. She died, poor soul, when he was born, and my brother 
not long after.” 

“ I can understand that you would have a peculiar affection for 
him above your natural feeling for your brother’s orphan.” 

“ lie was everything to me,” said the old man, huskily. “ I 
brought him up from the cradle, and I would let no one help me. 
I believe I was jealous of his very nurse. Certainly I sent her 
away as soon as he could toddle. I forgot, like the fool I was, 
that if I let him grow up without ever knowing anything of a 
woman’s tenderness, he would be the poorer all his life. He is 
the poorer, as I know now to my cost, though for twenty-one years 
I fancied myself the richer, since there was no one to dispute him 
with me.” 

“ And then ?” asked Mrs. Fursden, softly, seeing that he. broke 
off, and hesitated painfully, yet feeling certain that he wished to 
confide further in her. 

“Then he married, and that was the worst day’s work he ever 
did.” 

Mrs. Fursden looked her surprise. 

“ I had no idea that your nephew was a widower.” 


134 


TIIE PRICE OF A PEARL 


“Very few people have. I don’t suppose that any one in this 
place ever heard the story. But he wants your niece to know it, 
and he won’t ask her again till she does.” 

“Then he has asked her?” exclaimed Mrs. Fursden, to whom 
this was rather startling intelligence. 

“ Why, yes. So he tells me. But whether she said ‘ no,’ as 
if she meant it, is another matter. To be sure, something must 
he allowed for a man’s persistency ; but I hope that, if she is asked 
again, she will leave him in no doubt as to her real feelings.” 

Mrs. Fursden was more dismayed than she would have cared to 
admit at this piece of information, and she could hardly fail to 
interpret her niece’s behavior in an unfavorable light. 

Seeing that she remained silent, old Mr. Lewis inquired anx- 
iously if he had been too candid in his speech. 

“ I did not mean to blame Miss Merry weather,” he added, has- 
tily ; “ but if some wise friend like yourself would give her good 
advice, it would be doing a service all round.” 

“ I will certainly speak to her,” replied Mrs. Fursden, gravely ; 
“ and I think she will listen to me more readily than to any 
one else.” 

“So my nephew seemed to think — at least, he gave me to 
understand that I was to acquaint you with certain facts in his 
past life, and no doubt he trusted to your own judgment as to 
what use you might please to make of the information.” 

“You may be sure, Mr. Lewis, that I shall not abuse your con- 
fidence or his.” 

“ My dear lady, I am absolutely sure of it. I would honor 
your draft at sight. More than that I can’t say. But to go back 
to what I had begun to tell you. My nephew has been married 
already, and his marriage was a very unhappy one.” 

“ That was not his fault, surely ? I should have supposed he 
would make a very kind husband, little as I have seen of him.” 

“To the right woman, yes. But, unfortunately, he married the 
wrong woman, and she made him miserable, for which I blame 
her; but he insists on blaming himself.” 

“ I suppose they were both very young, too young probably to 
know their own minds ?” 

“ She was old enough to know hers, and did know it very well. 
He was only just of age, poor boy ! — his own master, worse luck ! 
and rich enough to make a splendid settlement on her, which, of 
course, was the chief attraction.” 


UNCLE CHRISTOPHER’S NARRATIVE 


135 


“But in saying that,” remonstrated Mrs. Fursden, . “ you are 
paying rather a doubtful compliment to your nephew.” 

“ My nephew,” exclaimed the old man, hotly, “ was a thousand 
times too good for her. She was not capable of understanding 
him at all; and as for love, she didn’t know the meaning of the 
word. He mistook her coldness of nature for angelic purity, and 
worshipped her as if she were a saint. Then, when he discovered, 
as he soon did, that she was a vain, silly, unprincipled woman, he 
found it hard to forgive her. Do you understand the situation ?” 

“ It is not a very uncommon one,” replied Mrs. Fursden, rather 
sadly. “-Where did your nephew meet this lady ?” 

“ Somewhere abroad, at one of those monster hotels where you 
knock against all sorts and conditions of men. She was with her 
father, a certain Captain Armytage, who always struck me as being 
next door but one to an adventurer, though I believe he was well 
connected.” 

“ And was she his only daughter ?” 

“ She let my nephew suppose so,” replied Mr. Lewis, rather 
mysteriously ; “ but after the marriage was safely over, it turned 
out that there was an elder sister.” 

“ Why should she have been kept in the background ?” 

“ Because she had made the mistake ol/running away from her 
husband with another man. Poor thing ! I believe she had been 
married very young to a brute who ill-used her frightfully, and, 
now that I think of it, I was reminded only last night of that very 
business. Do you happen to know anything of a Mr. MacAdam 
whom my nephew met somewhere yesterday afternoon ?” 

Mrs. Fursden looked rather astonished at this 'question. 

“ I know about as much as your nephew does, but not more, for 
I never met him myself till yesterday, when my brother Dr. Merry- 
weather brought him here to afternoon tea.” 

“ Oh ! then I suppose he is a friend of Miss Merry weather’s ?” 

The old gentleman spoke in a tone of dry disapproval, and the 
shaggy eyebrows formed one straight, forbidding black line across 
his expressive countenance. 

“ She has not told me if he is,” replied Mrs. Fursden, with 
excusable diplomacy ; but in her own mind she entertained very 
little doubt as to the real state of things between the guileless 
youth and the coquettish maiden. 

“ Then you don’t know what MacAdam he is, or who was his 
mother ?” 


136 


THE PRICE OF A PEARL 


Mrs. Fursden shook her head, and old Mr. Lewis uttered an im- 
patient groan. 

“ What is he doing here ?” he asked, in a tone so manifestly 
aggrieved that she could scarcely forbear from smiling. 

“ I believe he is studying natural science at the university.” 

“ And making love to Miss Merryweather,” pursued the irascible 
Uncle Christopher, who never missed an opportunity of jumping 
at conclusions. 

Again Mrs. Fursden’s sense of humor was tickled, and she 
found it hard to repress a smile, although, as she knew well, it 
was no laughing matter. 

“ As I have told you, Mr. Lewis, I never met the young man till 
yesterday, and your nephew knows just as much about him as 
I do.” 

“ I wish I knew who his mother was,” murmured the old gentle- 
man, uneasily. “ It would be very odd if — but there, I’m wan- 
dering from my point like a dotard, and must really beg you ten 
thousand pardons for trespassing on your time and patience so 
long. Shall I take up my hat and go ?” 

“ Without finishing your story ?” she answered, with her archly 
gentle smile. 

“ Ah, the story ! Well, it’s not a very long one, if it’s rather 
sad. My nephew married the young lady, as I told you, believing 
her to be an only daughter. The truth only came out by accident, 
but from that moment he was miserable. The gilt was off the 
gingerbread, as I could see myself when they came back from 
their honeymoon. Some men might have made allowances for the 
deceit, because undoubtedly a girl suffers in the eyes of the world 
from being mixed up with an esclandre of the sort that her sister 
had been guilty of. My nephew couldn’t. There’s an implacable 
element in his character that has to be reckoned with. To him 
his wife was smirched as much by her own falsehood as by her 
sister’s damaged reputation. He felt desperately bitter about the 
whole business, and bitterness is hardly conducive to married 
happiness.” 

“ Poor fellow !” exclaimed Mrs. Fursden, compassionately, un- 
derstanding at once with her quick womanly sympathy the nature 
of that secret burden which the younger Lewis must have carried 
all these years beneath his outward cloak of worldly prosperity. 

“Aye,” assented the uncle. “ It was a sad day for him when he 
first met that woman. They weren’t suited in any way — hadn’t an 


UNCLE CHRISTOPHER’S NARRATIVE 


137 


idea or a taste in common. Heaven only knows what he saw in 
her beyond her pretty face and her fine figure, but they certainly 
didn’t go far to make him happy.” 

“ Was she very unhappy herself ?” 

Old Mr. Lewis shrugged his shoulders and screwed up his face. 

“ I didn’t think so at the time,” he said, curtly. “ There never 
was much sign of a heart about her that I coufd see. Her baby 
died, owing entirely, the doctors said, to her own reckless impru- 
dence. It was a bitter blow to poor Bat, but she didn’t seem to 
care a pin, and of course that only widened the breach between 
them. I hardly ever saw them together after that. He went his 
way, and she went hers. She spent all the money he gave her, 
and a good deal more besides, more than he knows of to this day, 
for I kept the truth from him. Then came a terrible crisis in our 
affairs. You remember the year, I dare say — 185-, and all the 
financial disasters that overtook the country ? How we pulled 
through ourselves I hardly know to this day. We flung every 
penny of our own into the general stock, and then my nephew 
turned to his wife and asked her to stand by him in this hard 
pinch, and to give up her settlement.” 

“ She didn’t refuse, surely ?” exclaimed Mrs. Fursden, in evident 
amazement. 

The old gentleman sighed heavily. 

“ Don’t judge her too hardly,” he said, in a tone that was touch- 
ing from its sincere compunction. “ We did, both of us, and have 
repented ever since. She did refuse ; I didn’t know why till after- 
wards, when I found that her scamp of a father’ had been spong- 
ing on her systematically ever since her marriage.” 

“ But could she not have confided in her husband and in you ?” 

“ Ah, my dear lady, that’s precisely where the shoe pinches us 
both, though I still think he torments himself more than he need. 
Poor fellow ! he always feels that he was too hard on her at the 
beginning, and that if he had taken a different attitude about 
her sister she would have made him a better wife. That may or 
may not be true, but you’ll never get him to judge himself less 
harshly.” 

“ And how did the matter end, after she had refused to stand 
by him ?” 

“ Ah, well ! as it turned out he needn’t have touched her money 
at all. The tide had ebbed to its lowest point, jtfid we were able 
to meet our liabilities ; but the poor fellow had been cut to the 


138 


THE PRICE OF A PEARL 


heart, and nothing could comfort him. At last I proposed that he 
should go out for a while to Melbourne, and look after a branch 
house we have there. I thought a few months’ separation might 
do them both good, for, after all, there they were, tied together for 
better for worse, and it seemed a pity that it should only be for 
worse. He wouldn’t have gone even then if she had expressed a 
wish that he should stay, but she made no sign. So he went.” 

Uncle Christopher broke off at this point, and took a restless 
turn or two about the tiny room, apparently forgetful for the mo- 
ment where he was or what he was doing. 

“ What happened, Mr. Lewis ?” his hostess asked him, gently, 
after having watched these curious mechanical movements for a 
little while in sympathetic silence. 

“I beg your pardon, I really am not fit, I believe, for civilized 
society and the old man sat down again with one of those char- 
acteristic sighs of his that recalled a groan. “ It is not easy to tell 
you the rest, for God only knows what the poor thing meant, or did 
not mean. I used to go and see her often after her husband had 
sailed, but I fear my visits gave no pleasure to either of us. One 
morning they sent for me in hot haste to say she was ill, and I 
bolted off at once, calling for the doctor on my way. But she was 
beyond any help of ours. They had found her dead when they 
went to her room, her head under the clothes, and an uncorked 
bottle of laudanum in her hand. Her poor, empty, frivolous life 
was over. Whether she put an end to it herself will never be 
known on this side of heaven, but I know what my nephew thinks, 
though he has never told me, and though the jury did return a 
verdict of death by misadventure at the coroner’s inquest.” 

“Had she been in the habit of using laudanum for any ail- 
ment ?” 

“Not as far as we knew. She did not complain of being ill, 
and no one supposed she was. God grant it was not suicide, but, 
as I said before, I don’t know — no one knows.” 

“ It must have been a dreadful shock to her husband, especially 
if he thought — what you say he does think.” 

“ I didn’t see him for nearly six months afterwards, but when he 
came back his hair was almost as you see it now, and his youth 
was gone.” 

“ And he never thought of making a second marriage ?” 

“Never, until he met your niece. You won’t misunderstand 
me, I am sure, if I say I wish he never had met her.” 


UNCLE CHRISTOPHER’S NARRATIVE 


139 


“You can’t wisli it more than 1 do,” she answered, rather sadly; 
“ but such wishes are fruitless.” 

“ And yet,” exclaimed the old man, with a pathetic earnestness 
that went to her very heart, “ how happy she could make him, my 
dear lady, if she only would.” 

But Mrs. Fursden knew better. 

After hearing the story which had just been told to her, she was 
inclined, indeed, to doubt whether any woman could make Bartholo- 
mew Lewis happy as men are wont to be made happy. At all 
events, it was essential that the love should be on both sides, if his 
second marriage was not to turn out as disastrous a failure as his 
first. And it needed not the presence of Hector MacAdam yester- 
day afternoon to assure Mrs. Fursden that whosoever in the near 
or distant future should succeed in winning Pearl’s wayward heart, 
it was not this stern, reserved, yet humble lover. 


CHAPTER VI 


THE DRUID’S STONE 

“When that Clotilda through her curls 
Held both thine eyes in hers one day, 

I marvelled, let me say.” 

A few days later, society at Fingall, that part of it, at least, 
which spelt itself with a capital S, was greatly interested and ex- 
cited at the news that Mr. Lewis was about to give a water-party. 

What sort of an entertainment this might be was a matter for 
infinite conjecture and endless speculation to the vast majority of 
those who were invited to it, and expectations differed considerably 
as to the scale on which it was likely to be given. Some judged 
by the subscription that Mr. Lewis had sent to the infirmary that 
it would be nothing short of princely. Others inferred, from the 
simplicity of the man’s own manner of living, that his ideas of 
spending money were by no means exalted. 

But over and above the interest felt by the world in general in 
the projected festivity was the conviction that Miss Merry weather’s 
engagement would be announced directly afterwards, as a matter 
of course. 

That matters had not come to a crisis already was ascribed not 
to Pearl’s reluctance, but to her suitor’s tardiness in making up his 
mind, and very few persons indeed guessed that the momentous 
question had been put already, still less that it had been answered 
in the negative. 

The real state of the case was known only to Lady Dalrymple 
and to Mrs. Fursden, two individuals wdiose counsels w 7 ere likely to 
be so diametrically opposed that Pearl was hardly to be blamed for 
refusing to discuss the matter with either of them. Perceiving 
this, her godmother had therefore adopted the wily method of tak- 
ing the girl’s favorable decision for granted, and spoke on various 
occasions in her hearing of what she intended to do “ when Pearl 
left Fingall.” 

Mrs. Fursden, on the other hand, had, with consummate tact and 


THE DRUID’S STONE 


141 


tenderness, simply fulfilled the charge laid upon her by old Mr. 
Lewis. Filtered through her soft and womanly feelings, Bartholo- 
mew’s brief marriage-story lost none of its pathos, and Pearl was 
more moved by the recital than she would have cared to admit 
even to herself. 

She looked at Mr. Lewis with new eyes when she next met him, 
but found herself no whit less baffled than bQfore by his grave speech 
and measured manner, neither of which could be associated with 
the idea of an absorbing passion, either in the past or the present. 

And yet she did not need her aunt, or any one else, to tell her 
that his heart was hers, and that it behooved her, above all things, 
to deal uprightly with her own. Mrs. Fursden had not erred when 
she assured Christopher Lewis that her niece was aware of her re- 
sponsibilities. It did not follow of necessity that she would be 
faithful to them. Not to marry her middle-aged lover, but to re- 
main the paramount influence in his life, this — if Pearl had been 
honest enough to acknowledge it — was her secret desire, if it was 
not actually her tacit intention. 

In the forming of the party she had been, to a certain extent, 
consulted. As Mr. Lewis candidly explained to her, his draw-net 
had wide meshes, and she was likely to meet various individuals on 
board his boat — civic authorities, and the like, who had never been 
admitted beneath her godmother’s roof. 

“These people showed hospitality to me when I first came here, 
so I cannot leave them out; but that does not mean that I don’t 
wish you to meet your own friends, Miss Merryweather. If you 
will fill these up as you please, you will be doing me a favor, and I 
hope yourself a pleasure.” 

“ This is giving us carte blanche with a vengeance !” exclaimed 
Pearl, at sight of the packet of invitation-cards which he laid on 
the table. “ Are we expected to fill up all these, Mr. Lewis ?” 

“ As many as you please — no more and no less.” 

“ And what does your uncle say to such a wholesale invasion ?” 

“ He says nothing ; but when the day comes he will simply dis- 
appear. Did you hear that he had made friends with your aunt, 
Mrs. Fursden ?” 

“Yes, I heard that. I was not surprised.” 

“ Then you have seen her since Sunday afternoon ?” and Lewis 
bent forward a little eagerly as he put the question. 

Had he been any one else, it is quite possible that she would 
have kept him on the rack of uncertainty by some evasive or mis- 


142 


THE PRICE OF A PEARL 


chievous reply ; but there was that in him which had always re- 
pressed her more superficial coquetries, so effectually, indeed, that 
he disbelieved in their very existence, though he was as likely as not 
to be the victim of the nature which engendered them. 

“I have seen her — yes,” she replied, after a moment’s almost 
imperceptible yet significant pause which told him that she was in 
possession of his past, history. 

He waited for two or three minutes before he spoke again, dur- 
ing which she occupied herself with filling up the cards. 

It was not the moment for definite speech, but he could not for- 
bear from feeling his way a little further. 

“ I asked you once for your sympathy, do you remember ?” 

She bowed her head silently, but kept her eyes resolutely low- 
ered, and he felt that he was groping in the dark. 

“ I have thought since that I had no right to it, and that when 
you knew all, you would only blame me, as — as 1 have often 
blamed myself.” 

This time she shook her head, but apparently she still found 
speech impossible. 

“ You said I was relentless,” he continued, always in the same 
dry, level voice, which failed so utterly to stir in her the faintest 
chord of response, “and you were right. I hope I am not, but — 
I was once.” 

“ To yourself I think you are still,” she answered, with a gentle 
hesitation that misled him cruelly. 

It seemed to assure him so plainly that she, at least, would not be 
relentless. For the first time since he had known her he felt hope- 
ful when he went out from her presence. 

People who saw the girl that afternoon made up their minds that 
the faint spots of color in her cheeks betokened excitement, pleas- 
urable or otherwise, at Mr. Lewis’s marked attentions. But they 
were mistaken. 

It was not his presence, but the absence of Hector MacAdam 
which had power to disturb her thus. Six days had passed since 
the two had met, and to Pearl they certainly seemed the longest, 
the weariest, and the most futile of her whole life. 

To-day she watched for him with almost feverish anxiety, for 
when had he ever failed to attend Lady Dalrymple’s weekly recep- 
tion ? But as the hours wore on, and there was still no sign of his 
coming, she began to feel reckless. She had not the slightest doubt 
left that Mrs. Mandeville’s influence was at work to keep him away, 


THE DRUID’S STONE 


143 


and slie was well aware that that lady would not hesitate to make 
the most of any floating rumors which might he extant in Fingall 
respecting herself and Mr. Lewis. 

Never had the girl’s heart felt so heavy as now, when her world- 
ly prospects were the most brilliant, and but a word was needed 
to make her the wife of the richest commoner in England. 

It was in this frame of mind that she repaired with Miss Sca- 
ford, on the appointed day, to the Druid’s Glen, a lovely spot sit- 
uated about half-way between Fingall and Hazelbridge ; and more 
fitted, perhaps, than any other point on the river to be the back- 
ground of a gathering such as that which Mr. Lewis had brought 
together. 

Miss Seaford did not look forward to the entertainment with 
much pleasure, although she had been presented with a new and 
handsome dress by her patroness. Well, indeed, was she acquaint- 
ed with the fate in store for her — with the fruitless efforts to keep 
Pearl in sight, to parry impertinent questions from too curious 
matrons, to be seasonably blind and properly deaf, to know every- 
thing, to know nothing, and at the end of *the day to render up 
an account of all proceedings to one who was apt to cross-exam- 
ine and to browbeat and bully like a lawyer. Verily, no black 
silk dress, however fashionably made, could compensate the poor 
lady for all that she went through on these occasions. 

Most of the assembled guests had already arrived when Miss 
Merryweather, dressed in a costly little French toilet of white fou- 
lard, whose exquisite simplicity made every other girl present look 
dowdily or unsuitably attired, drove up in Lady Dalrymple’s car- 
riage, and amid admiring, critical, hostile, and envious glances 
walked across the towing-path to the narrow gangway, where her 
host had taken up his position. 

The scene was a remarkably pretty one, and had the merit of 
novelty to nearly every one present. A couple of large marquees 
close to the river’s edge served as sitting-rooms for such of the 
guests as desired shelter from the sun, or objected to the com- 
paratively narrow quarters of the cabins. The deck, polished to 
a dazzling whiteness, was covered with a light awning, beneath 
which were visible various tables, some round, some square, but 
all bright with flowers, gleaming with rich plate, and sparkling 
with crystal. 

Yes ; there was no doubt about it, Mr. Lewis knew how to en- 
tertain his guests right royally ; and more than once did Pearl 


144 


THE PRICE OF A PEARL 


overhear whispered comments, in which her own name and his 
were closely coupled. 

“ All this will be cleared away by-and-by,” her host proceeded 
to explain to her, “ and then I propose to have the boat towed up 
the river as far as Hazelbridge, as the best mode of conveyance 
for those who don’t care to walk through the glen. I have ar- 
ranged for tea at the lock, and in the cool of the evening we can 
come back here, where the carriages will be in waiting. Do you 
approve of my plan, Miss Merry weather ?” 

“ I should be very ungrateful — ” she began, smiling ; but she 
was not allowed to finish her sentence. 

From the opposite side of the vessel Mrs. Mandeville had ob- 
served her arrival, and now stood before her with a significant 
gleam of her white teeth which only a very superficial observer 
could have mistaken for a smile. 

“ You’ll forgive my left hand ; the right, as you see, is still help- 
less, though my doctor assures me I could not have been better 
looked after than I was. By-the-way, Mr. McAdam is coming to- 
day, he tells me. He was dining with me last night.” 

“ Oh, really !” and Pearl’s tone sounded commendably indiffer- 
ent, although her throat was tightened with a spasm of fiercely 
jealous anger. 

“ MacAdam ! that was the young man to whom you introduced 
me on Sunday ?” said Lewis, pricking up his ears at the mention 
of a name which had only painful memories connected with it. 

“ Yes ; here he comes,” said Pearl, very quietly, with a cool 
little nod of welcome which made Hector feel as if the mental 
barometer had gone down by leaps and bounds since last Sunday. 

His host greeted him with grave courtesy, and Mrs. Mandeville 
inquired how he had got home the night before. 

“ I w r alked,” said Hector, briefly, as he shook hands with Pearl, 
who, for the first time in his acquaintance with her, had appar- 
ently neither look nor smile to bestow upon him. 

“ I think you were right. I shouldn’t have cared much to trust 
myself to Captain Lonsdale’s driving and Mrs. Mandeville’s bold 
black eyes gave a meaning flash of intelligence which had the ef- 
fect of bringing the ready color into Hector’s face. 

Mr. Lewis watched him gravely, even earnestly, for a few mo- 
ments, and then turned away to give some necessary order for the 
placing of his guests. 

“ Mr. MacAdam, I shall expect you to cut up my dinner for me,” 


THE DRUID’S STONE 


145 


said Mrs. Mandeville, with a side-glance at Pearl, as much as to 
say, “ This young man is my property to-day, not yours.” 

Pearl, who had never yet entered into conscious rivalry with 
any woman, ignored both glance and words ; consequently, Hec- 
tor’s incoherent murmur of response was lost on her. 

“ No man is worth fighting about,” she had declared, emphati- 
cally, at the very outset of her career ; and, if she did not think 
so to-day, she remained faithful, at least externally, to her old 
principles. 

In vain did poor Hector seek to catch her eye during luncheon, 
and telegraph to her his disappointment at the position assigned 
to him. She was within earshot, for he could overhear much of 
her conversation with Lord Bertie ; but he was apparently out of 
the range of her vision, for she never once glanced in his direction. 

The banquet being over, the company was invited to go ashore 
while the decks were cleared for further action. Various little 
groups accordingly detached themselves from the main body, and 
began to saunter off in the direction of the glen. 

Mrs. Mandeville, still leaning coquettishly on Hector’s unwilling 
arm, proceeded to look round in search of some fresh opportunity 
for putting herself en evidence. 

“ Who is going to help me to climb the Druid’s Stone? Now, 
don’t all speak at once. Mr. Lewis, I suppose you have really 
nothing left to wish for, or I would suggest that you should set 
us the example and make the first ascent.” 

“ What is the particular charm attached to it?” inquired Lewis, 
dryly. 

“ Don’t you really know ? I quite thought you had asked us 
here on purpose. If you can get to the top of the stone, and re- 
main there while you drink a glass of water from the wishing well, 
you will get whatever you want, but if a drop of the water is 
spilled you lose all.” 

“In short,” rejoined her host, with provoking coolness, “you 
want a good head and a steady hand.” 

“ I can assure you,” she answered, a little nettled by his uncon- 
cerned manner, “ that it’s not so easy as you think. I have known 
a man who could climb the Himalayas, but he was quite unable to 
keep his balance on the top of the Druid’s Stone.” 

“ Poor Mandeville !” murmured Lord Bertie, in a mocking 
undertone to Pearl, who stood beside him. “One understands 
now why his life has been such a failure.” 

10 


146 


THE PRICE OF A PEARL 


Although Pearl’s mood was anything but a gay one, she could 
not help laughing, and Mrs. Mandeville turned round rather sharply. 

“ Suppose you try, Lord Bertie ! It would be easier for you 
than for any of us.” 

“ Nay,” he replied, placidly. “ I have ascertained already that 
I can’t have what I want, so I don’t see why I should run the risk 
of breaking an arm or leg. A new one of either would be so 
awfully expensive.” 

“ Did I ever see such a set of unadventurous men ? Mr. Mac- 
Adam, what do you say ? Will you put them all to shame, and 
put your own fate to the test on the top of the Druid’s Stone ?” 

“ I don’t in the least mind trying to get up, but I don’t believe 
in any nonsense about one’s fate depending upon it,” returned 
Hector, with boyish candor. 

“ Hear, hear !” and Lewis nodded approvingly. “ Mr. Mac- 
Adam evidently intends to be the master of his own fate.” 

“ The Druid shall not have a hand in it, anyhow,” the youth 
answered, stoutly. 

“ All very well,” said Mrs. Mandeville ; “ but there are some 
things one can’t do one’s self, and can’t prevent, either.” 

“ But it appears that one can climb the Druid’s Stone, so I pro- 
pose we go and see it,” observed Lewis, rather stiffly. 

He was not one of those who attached much blame to the ab- 
sent husband of this notorious little lady. 

Falling back a step or two in her rear, he inquired of Bertie 
Meredith whether young MacAdam was a great friend of Mrs. 
Mandeville’s. 

“ She is a great friend of his,” replied Bertie, significantly ; “ or 
enemy, as one chooses to put it.” 

“Well, they are sometimes convertible terms. Do you happen 
to know anything of his family ? What MacAdam is he ?” 

“ His father is the owner of Adamscourt, a large place in Scot- 
land, adjoining one of ours.” 

“ And his mother ? Who was she, do you know ?” 

“ A Miss Armytage, I believe ; but she has been dead these two 
years. Why, did you know her ?” perceiving that Mr. Lewis gave 
a slight start at these words, and drew his grizzled eyebrows some- 
what sharply together. 

“ Not herself,” he answered, briefly ; “ but her family. You say 
she is dead ?” 

“ Yes, poor thing, she died at Oxford and Bertie proceeded to 


THE DRUID’S STONE 147 

narrate the circumstances under which Hector’s mother had lost 
her life. 

Lewis listened in perfect silence. 

“ Is he the only son ?” he asked, after he had heard the whole. 
“ I had fancied there was another brother.” 

“ There was, but he was drowned at Oxford in his first term. 
Besides, this fellow was the eldest. Of course he will have Adams- 
court some day.” 

“ The estates are entailed, I suppose ?” said Lewis, with a gravi- 
ty which Lord Bertie fancied he could account for, as also the 
keenly searching look in the man’s eyes when he again found him- 
self in Hector’s immediate vicinity. 

By this time they had reached the famous stone, which — both 
on account of its colossal size and of its strange position, poised 
slantwise above the ground upon a tiny rock — seemed a relic 
rather of some prehistoric race of man than of the comparatively 
modern Druid. 

“ H’m, this is not so bad as I expected,” said Lewis, after a 
brief survey of the situation. “ I won’t promise to take you up, 
Mrs. Mandeville, but I fancy I can make the climb myself.” 

“ But have you anything to wish for ?” she asked him, pointed- 
ly, and Pearl was secretly infuriated at the ill-bred curiosity and 
vulgar chaff which underlay the question. 

She could not but feel grateful to Mr. Lewis for the cool tone in 
which he answered : 

“ I wish to prove to myself that I am still fit to be a member of 
the Alpine Club.” 

“ If I were Miss Merryweather, I would not allow you to go.” 

“ I accept no responsibility one way or the other,” said Pearl, 
coldly. 

“And you may be quite sure,” returned Lewis, “that I have no 
wish to lay it on you.” 

He walked backward a few steps as he spoke, measured with 
half-closed eyes the distance that lay between him and the stone, 
and then sprang upon it with a force and agility for which the girl 
had never given him credit. 

If his hair was gray and his vision defective, there was plenty of 
vigor left in that spare, sinewy frame which she had been disposed 
to associate only with the desk and the counting-house. A dozen 
pairs of eyes followed his movements with intense interest, but he 
was conscious only of hers, 


148 


THE PRICE OF A PEARL 


Inch by inch he made his way along the smooth, polished sur- 
face of the huge menhir, and Pearl watched him with strangely 
mingled feelings. 

She was neither proud nor pleased, hut she was greatly aston- 
ished, and, if the truth must he told, secretly uneasy. Conscious 
as she was of her own weakness — the weakness that is born of 
double mind and feeble purpose — she feared his strength, and al- 
most prayed that at the critical moment it might fail him. 

Lord Bertie glanced at her once or twice as she stood a little 
apart from the rest, awaiting the issue of this curious test to which 
her grave lover had submitted himself. 

“ If she marries him,” he reflected, “ I give her up. It will be 
for money, not for love, and the poor fellow deserves a better 
fate.” 

In obedience to some strange impulse for which he afterwards 
blamed himself, Bertie then suffered his long legs to carry him in 
the direction of Mrs. Mandeville, to whom he had not hitherto 
been at pains to show the smallest attention. 

“ I have been admiring your sling,” he said, in the lazy drawl 
which he so often substituted in society like hers for his natural 
voice, and as he spoke he laid his hand on the handsome Oriental 
scarf that supported her disabled arm. 

An almost imperceptible wink to Hector explained the motive of 
this unexpected compliment to a lady whom he avowedly held in 
the frankest abhorrence, and the young man was not slow to take 
the hint. 

When Mrs. Mandeville had recovered from her excessive aston- 
ishment at finding herself singled out by Lord Bertie, she dis- 
covered that Hector had somehow managed to effect his escape. 
A very few moments later, and Mr. Lewis was greeted with a loud 
hurrah of applause. He had reached the extreme point of the 
stone, and was now holding on with strained muscles and closed 
eyes while the huge mass swayed slowly backwards and forwards 
on its narrow basis until it had regained its equilibrium. 

When at last he dared to look down from his exalted position, 
he beheld a sight that made all his toil vain. Among the many 
faces below, two only were gazing — not at him, but at each other. 

“ Aren’t you going to take your wish, Mr. Lewis ?” cried Mrs. 
Mandeville, in her shrillest accents, seeing that he was already 
preparing to descend to terra firma, without submitting to that 
further trial which, as she assured him, constituted the real charm. 


THE DRUID’S STONE 


149 


“ No, thanks,” he answered, carelessly, “ I’m afraid I have no 
faith in wishes.” 

Yet even then he felt that that bitter moment was prophetic, and 
looking back upon it in after-life he knew that it had summed up 
his whole heart history. 


CHAPTER V II 


ANDROMACHE 

“Je vis qu’ils etaient deux, 

A deux Tame est joyeuse.” 

It has been said that age brings wisdom, but there is a certain 
divine simplicity peculiar to the very young which sometimes 
serves their purpose quite as effectually as premeditated prudence. 
Had Hector MacAdam been a dozen years older than he was, he 
might possibly have opened proceedings with Miss Merryweather 
by a few aimless remarks on indifferent subjects, which would as 
likely as not have had the effect of provoking her to make some 
stinging rejoinder. 

As it was, he approached her with that air of boyish resolution 
which she had always secretly admired, and, with one quick com- 
prehensive glance around to make sure that no one overheard him, 
he said, quietly : 

“ I. have heard from my father.” 

Whatever Pearl’s feelings might have been five minutes before, 
she was in no doubt about them now. Her jealousy had vanished, 
her wrath was disarmed, and her heart was beating high with re- 
newed hope and eager expectation. She did not say a word, but 
simply turned to look at him, and to read in his earnest, truthful 
eyes the real significance of what he had just told her. 

“You remember what we talked of last Sunday?” said Hector, 
seeing that she answered nothing, and that her questioning gaze 
was sincere as well as gentle. 

“I have not forgotten, but I thought perhaps — you did not 
wish me to remember.” 

“ But why ?” he asked, in evident surprise, and again his divine 
simplicity stood him in good stead with this wayward maiden. 

“ Because you gave me so many days in which to forget it.” 

His face was radiant with delight as he exclaimed, eagerly : 

“ Oh, if you knew what it cost me to keep away 1” 


ANDROMACHE 


151 


“ And why did you ?” she asked, always with the same delicious 
gentleness in her eyes and voice. 

“ Because I wrote to my father the day after I saw you, and I 
felt that till I had his answer I could not see you again. Oh, what 
a row these people are making !” 

It was then that Pearl looked up — one moment too late' — and 
perceived with some compunction that she had turned her back on 
the Druid’s Stone and forgotten for the time being the very exist- 
ence of Mr. Lewis. 

“Do come away,” whispered Hector, imploringly. “Never mind 
Miss Seaford or any one else. There is such a crowd that you have 
every excuse for being lost in it.” 

“Unfortunately,” sighed Pearl, “the Fingall crowd is never quite 
big enough to get lost in.” 

But she followed him without remonstrance, as he led her 
swiftly through a steep narrow path fraught with various obsta- 
cles in the way of thorns and briers, and so far like the road to 
heaven that there was only room for one to walk in it. 

It terminated at last in a sort of natural bower, of which the 
interlacing branches of the tall beech-trees formed the roof, and 
last year’s leaves were the carpet. Here he turned to her, and for 
a moment or two they stood together, listening to the perfect si- 
lence of that peerless summer’s day, perhaps also to the loud and 
hurried beating of their own hearts. 

“ I came here yesterday,” he said, presently, the color deepen- 
ing, as he spoke, in his fair boyish face, “ and I promised myself 
that you should come to-day — that is, if you would. At one time 
I thought you wouldn’t.” 

It was her turn to blush now at the remembrance of her own 
needless self-torture. Clearly there had been no grounds for jeal- 
ousy, the dinner of last night notwithstanding. This was not the 
sort of man to be wiled by the cheap, noisy charms of a woman 
like Mrs. Mandeville, however handsome she might be, and how- 
ever audacious. 

It did not occur to Pearl at the time that she herself, for all her 
refinement and all her vague aspirations, might work more real 
and abiding misery to a man in one short hour than could be ac- 
complished by the other in half a lifetime. 

She was in a blissful dream at present, one of those dreams in 
which no effort seems impossible, no sacrifice unreasonable, and 
love is the only real meaning of life. 


152 


THE PRICE OF A PEARL 


“ I was cross,” slie said, in a drolly penitent manner, in answer 
to his last words. 

“ But why ?” he ashed, simply, not attempting to deny the truth 
of her self-accusation. 

“Oh, never mind why; it was foolish of me. You have not 
often seen me cross, have you ?” 

“ Never before, that I remember. I could not think what had 
happened, and it seemed to me that I had the best right to be 
cross under the circumstances.” 

“ My brother Stephen would not have pitied you,” she said, 
archly. 

“ So I was given to understand, and I sincerely wished that he 
was in my place.” 

“ But I was under the impression that you liked Mrs. Mande- 
ville.” 

“ So was I — until last night.” 

She glanced at him in some surprise, but he did not offer to 
explain himself, and she did not press him further. 

“ Look,” he said, pointing to a moss-covered rock close at hand. 
“ This is my Druid’s Stone. It is not a very comfortable seat, but 
it will hold us both, if you do not mind trying it for a few min- 
utes.” 

“ They must be very few, then, or we shall be missed, both of 
us. We must not wait till some one is sent to look for us, as we 
did last Sunday.” 

“ Ah ! Sunday was a blessed day in my life. I wanted to talk 
to you about that.” 

“You said you had written to your father.” 

“ This is his answer ;” and Hector laid an open letter on her lap 
with a look in his clear blue eyes that betokened that “ child’s 
heart ” of which Lord Bertie had spoken at once so wistfully and 
so tenderly. 

“ You wish me to read it?” 

Her murmuring voice caressed him, as the breeze caressed the 
leaves above their heads. 

“ Yes ; but first — ” his hand arrested hers for a moment as it 
was about to take up the letter. “You know why I wrote to 
him ?” 

The touch was unlike any other she had felt, and it opened up 
a new world to her. That such a world existed she had not 
doubted. She had long known that she could move others, while 


ANDROMACHE 


153 


remaining unmoved lierself, and the knowledge had been a snare 
to her. 

But now, now — in one brief moment all life was changed, for 
the little god of love had stabbed her to the heart. She would 
fain have withdrawn her hand, but it was only clasped the more 
firmly. 

“ You know that I love your?” 

What words had the girl ever heard that sounded in her ears 
half so sweet as these ? What wonder that her lip should quiver, 
and her eyes glisten until they saw nothing else in the whole 
world but Hector’s face ? 

Another moment and the letter slipped unheeded to the ground. 
His arms were round her, and their lips met. 

“ I love you,” he repeated, with the passionate fervor of a devo- 
tee before the shrine. 

It was characteristic of him, as she remembered afterwards, that 
he never once asked her if she loved him. 

“Since when?” she whispered, giving herself up without re- 
serve to the unalloyed rapture of the present moment. 

“ Since the beginning, since that first day when I stood outside 
Mrs. Fursden’s window, and heard you sing my mother’s song.” 

“ I remember,” and to both their lips simultaneously arose the 
words of the refrain, 

“ For a love born on a May morn.”. 

How foolish they were that afternoon, and how divinely happy ! 
They did not know — how should they ? — and they could not have 
believed that in all the long years before them life could give 
them no better moment than this : that a happy memory is after 
all, as a great poet once sang, the only real happiness on earth. 

“ I have a name for you,” he said, tenderly, “ that I want to 
call you by just once, if you will let me. You may be Pearl to the 
rest of the world, and I know the name suits you, but mine is 
sweeter. I wonder if you ever heard of Andromache ?” 

He saw that she understood by the delicious shamefaced smile 
that lighted up her face, although she assured him the next mo- 
ment that he was taking far too much for granted. 

“ All these days past since Sunday that is the name by which I 
have called you. You are my Andromache, and what she said 
that Hector was to her, please God I may be to you some day.” 

“Did she say that. Hector was her conscience?” whispered 


154 


THE PRICE OF A PEARL 


Pearl, with that strange humility born of love which makes all 
lovers for the time being show better than they are. 

“ She said that he was father, mother, and brother in one.” 

Pearl gave a sigh, and looked wistful. 

“ I don’t remember my mother, and as for my father, I wonder 
sometimes what difference it would have made in his life if I had 
never been born.” 

“ Will he — will he be displeased now ?” asked Hector, anx- 
iously. 

“He will have some difficulty at first in remembering who you 
are. If you were a candidate for holy orders he would know all 
about you, but as it is — ” She broke off, with a smile that was 
scarcely mirthful, and then added, hastily, “ But what will your 
father say ? That’s more to the point just at present.” 

“ Now that I think of it, you haven’t read his letter,” exclaimed 
Hector, stooping to pick up the important document which had 
been intended to serve as a preface, and was after all only a post- 
script. 

She began to read with an interest naturally quickened by her 
newly-born tenderness, but before she had turned over the first 
page she was conscious of some chill misgiving for which she 
could not fairly account. The letter ran as follows : 

“My dear Hector, — I have been ill, or you should have had 
an answer to your letter before this. That it has surprised me I 
will not deny, for it is not yet six weeks since we parted on the 
understanding that you had chosen your own path in life, and 
meant to follow it. I gather more from what you leave unwritten 
than from what I actually read in your letter, that you have come 
across that inevitable She in whose hands, as you probably imag- 
ine, lies your whole future destiny. You will certainly not believe 
me if I tell you that she is only the first of a series who will all 
leave some mark upon your life. Sooner or later, of course, I 
foresaw that she must make her appearance. Do not imagine that 
I intend any disrespect either to her or to you if I say that I wish 
it had been later rather than sooner. I cannot explain myself fur- 
ther at present. If you can spare time to run down here for a 
couple of nights, I shall be glad to see you and talk to you of 
certain family matters on which, for reasons of my own, I have 
hitherto been silent. Your affectionate father, 

“ Hector MacAdam.” 


ANDROMACHE 


155 


There was a vague trouble visible in Pearl’s face when she had 
finished reading this epistle, which communicated itself to her lover, 
and caused him to ask her uneasily why she looked like that. 

“It is such a cold letter,” she replied, with some hesitation. 

“But much less cold than I expected. I didn’t think that I 
should have been let off so easily, and you see he asks me to go 
and talk things over.” 

“ You don’t think that he knows of anything which could pre- 
vent — ” She stopped abruptly, and again the shadow of some com- 
ing sorrow seemed to project itself across her mental horizon. 

“ Nothing could prevent our being happy together, unless he 
chose to withdraw my allowance, and he never would do that. 
Darling, what objection to my marriage with you could he possi- 
bly make f” 

“I don’t know,” said Pearl, doubtfully. “Perhaps he may 
think you ought to marry an heiress, and it remains to be seen 
whether my godmother will leave me one penny. To be sure, peo- 
ple are kind enough to say that she will, but she has never said so 
herself.” 

“ As far as we are concerned, she needn’t,” replied Hector, with 
some loftiness. “My father has never taken me into his confi- 
dence, but I have used my eyes and ears. Adamscourt is a good 
property, I know, and we were not badly off before we got it.” 

“ Still,” sighed Pearl, “ I wish that you hadn’t shown me that 
letter.” 

“ I wish I hadn’t, since you take it so much to heart ; but in- 
deed, my darling, you needn’t make yourself unhappy. It will all 
come right, you’ll see, and when he knows you — ” Hector broke 
off at this point, and finished his sentence in a way more effectually 
calculated to reassure her than any words, however eloquent. 

And yet she was not wholly reassured. A cloud had come over 
her sunshine. She had an uneasy feeling that some trial awaited 
her, for which nothing in her past life had prepared her. She could 
not look back on any previous struggle, still less on any hard- 
earned victory, the memory of which might now have encouraged 
her to sustained effort. 

The consciousness of her own moral impotence was again borne 
in upon her as it had been before in connection with Mr. Lewis ; 
but this time it was accompanied by a bitter compunction of the 
sort that men, when looking back on their past lives under similar 
circumstances, feel more often than women. 


156 


THE PRICE OF A PEARL 


Although they were now walking in single file along the narrow 
path leading to the glen, and although her face, in consequence, 
was completely hidden from him, Hector’s quick, lover-like instincts 
assured him that something was still amiss. 

He sought to make her look round by saying, gently : 

“You are not sorry that we took this path, though it is rather 
thorny ?” 

“ It would have been wiser to stay below,” she answered, and 
he felt that she was not wholly in jest. 

“ But I could not have gone without speaking ; and, dearest, I 
had a reason for what I didXYou don’t know, I am sure, what 
people are saying of you !” 

She stopped then, turned round, and faced him with a sort of 
hunted look in her strange eyes that he never thought of after- 
wards without a pang. 

“ For people,” she said, slowly and even bitterly, “ read Mrs. 
Mandeville.” 

“ Not Mrs. Mandeville only. Pearl, my darling, you wondered 
why I had changed my mind about her. I’m not fickle, I am not 
indeed, but I have found out that she is no true friend of yours.” 

Pearl’s laugh was scarcely expressive of merriment. 

“ I could have told you that long ago if you had cared to ask 
me, and also that she would make you my enemy if she could.” 

It was his turn to laugh now, as he repeated, quietly : 

“ If she could.” 

“ What did she say last night ?” and Pearl walked on a step or 
two in front lest he should observe the trembling of her paling 
lips. 

“ It was not so much what she said herself, as what she let 
others say in her presence that sickened me. I don’t know how I 
sat through that dinner, but I do know that I shall never go to 
another.” 

“ Tell me what she said,” urged the girl, impatiently. 

They had emerged upon the towing-path by this time, but al- 
though he now walked beside her, she had erected a barrier be- 
tween them in the shape of her smart lace parasol, and he tried in 
vain to obtain more than a passing glimpse of her face. 

“ Pearl, I hate to tell you. I neither want to soil your ears nor 
my own lips. They told lies — odious lies as well as ill-natured 
ones.” 

“ They said I was going to marry Mr. Lewis.” 


ANDROMACHE 157 

Very clear and incisive was the tone of Pearl’s voice as she said 
this, and he was almost taken aback. 

“ If that had been all,” he stammered, and blushed as if he him- 
self had been the culprit. 

“ I can guess the rest,” she said, coldly. “ I dare say some of 
them are giving each other odds on the subject. I have no doubt 
that Mrs. Mandeville has backed me heavily, and begins to feel 
anxious about her money. Well, never mind. They will all be 
disappointed.” 

He looked surprised as well as troubled. 

“ I can’t bear to think, Pearl, that you should know such odious 
people, or be known by them.” 

“ Oh,” she answered, sadly, “ I would to Heaven that I knew as 
little of the odiousness of human nature as you do. Dear ! do you 
know that you make me feel old and wicked sometimes, and never 
so much as when you take for granted I am good ? Do you know 
that, if you had been at all like other men, you would have been 
warned off me by what you heard last night ?” 

“ But do you suppose I believed one word of it? Haven’t I seen 
you with the fellow myself ? Do you suppose I thought you cared 
for him?” 

Her heart almost stood still for a moment in sheer terror. 

That she should marry Lewis without caring for him did not ap- 
parently strike this guileless nature as being within the range of 
possibility ! How could she ever make him understand enough to 
pardon her? Oh, what would she not have given at that moment 
to wipe out the record of the past five years, and to see the world 
with that purity of heart and singleness of vision which alone make 
men invincible because fearless ! 

“ Wait,” she said, imploringly. “ Do not say a word against 
Mr. Lewis. He has been a true friend to me.” 

“ Yes, I know, but — ” 

“ He does want to marry me. I wish he did not, but he does ; 
and if you had not come here when you did, a month ago, I should 
have — married him. Now you know the truth. Do you despise me ?” 

“ Despise you ? No ! How could I ? But you would have made 
a terrible mistake. With a fellow like that you couldn’t be anything 
but miserable.” 

“ And yet — if you only knew — he is such a good man. I wouldn’t 
for the world have you speak slightingly of him. You may not 
like him, perhaps, but — ” 


158 


THE PRICE OF A PEARL 


“ I don’t dislike him,” interrupted Hector, “ at least, I shouldn’t 
if he hadn’t the cheek to think himself good enough for you.” 

“And what about yourself?” she answered, with a touch of her 
old diablerie; but at that precise moment Lord Bertie, watch in 
hand, met them at a certain bend of the river which brought into 
view the lock appointed by their host to be the general rendezvous. 

“ I have been looking out for you,” he observed, languidly. 
“ There is the boat just rounding the corner. You’ll only have time 
to catch that train, MacAdam, if you start now.” 

Pearl looked from one to the other in evident surprise. Bertie’s 
grotesque countenance was impassible as a mask, and he turned 
away almost as abruptly as he had come — unwilling, perhaps, to 
assist further at a scene which could not but be painful. 

“ I had better not go any farther,” said Hector. “ Bertie will 
take you on to the lock.” 

“ You are going away !” she exclaimed, dismayed at the prospect 
of losing him. 

“ I meant to tell you before. I am going home to-night. I shall 
be back on Tuesday morning at latest. Pearl, my darling, it will 
be all right. I shall go and see your father the first thing when I 
return.” 

“ Oh, my father will be easily managed. I am not afraid of Aim.” 

“ Well, mine is not an ogre, after all; and at the worst — the very 
worst — he can only make us wait. He can’t undo to-day, or come 
between our hearts, can he, darling ?” 

He took her two hands in his, and his soul was in his eyes as he 
put this question. 

“ But what if he comes between our lives ?” she faltered, and 
her lips quivered. 

“ There is no one on earth who can do that if we are true to 
each other. Pearl, my beloved, just once before I go call me 
Hector.” 

She took the name upon her lips, and uttered it in a tone that 
thrilled him with a kind of awed rapture. 

“Think of me. to-morrow,” he whispered, tenderly, “when you 
are in church, and wish me safe through the afternoon. And now 
good-bye.” 

The boat was fast gliding up the stream, on whose banks were 
crowded an army of idlers from the neighboring hamlets, all eager 
to see the smartly-dressed, fashionable guests for whom the old 
lock-keeper had been desired to make such extensive preparations. 


ANDROMACHE 


159 


The risk of observation was too great, and unwillingly he dropped 
her hands ; but his eyes still held hers, and their very glance was 
an embrace. 

“ Andromache !” he whispered, and the tone in which the word 
was uttered haunted her long after the sound of his retreating foot- 
steps had died away. 

His voice in the years to come would ever differ from all others 
in this, that it had first awakened her slumbering heart. Whether 
it was strong enough to silence all others that might yet beset her 
was another matter. And perhaps Lord Bertie’s heavy sigh, as he 
came forward and took his friend’s place beside her, was not purely 
selfish. 


CHAPTER VIII 


FOR THE SECOND TIME OF ASKING 

“She should never have looked at me 
If she meant I should not love her!” 

“ And where is Uncle Christopher to-day ?” inquired Pearl, after 
a few disjointed commonplaces had been interchanged between her- 
self and Mr. Lewis, all intended, as she well knew, to lead up to that 
main point at issue from which further evasion was now impossible. 

She was installed in Uncle Christopher’s own state-room on board 
the house-boat. Bat himself had established her there, on the plea 
that her long walk through the glen must have wearied her, but in 
reality that he might embrace the opportunity afforded him for 
the momentous interview by the temporary dispersion of his vari- 
ous guests on shore. 

Still, being neither a very young nor a very eloquent lover, he 
found it hard work to introduce his subject, and was proportion- 
ately grateful to Pearl when she thus — consciously or unconsciously 
— provided him with a favorable opening by her inquiry for Uncle 
Christopher. 

“ He would be greatly delighted, I am sure, if he knew that you 
had asked for him by that name,” the nephew answered, quietly. 

Pearl colored, and hastened to apologize for the liberty she had 
taken. “ The name had come out,” she explained, “ purely by ac- 
cident ; she was aware that she had no right to use it.” 

“ I do not look at it from that point of view,” replied Lewis, in 
the old tone of measured courtesy which made his wooing so un- 
convincing to this damsel whose affections he would fain have won. 

It seemed to tell of such long desuetude in the matter of love- 
making, and though Pearl knew that she ought by rights to have 
been flattered by the subtle tribute to her own individual charms, 
which was thus tacitly conveyed by her grave lover’s shy address, 
she never failed secretly to resent the slight to her sex implied in it. 

A greater familiarity with the ways of women would have given 


FOR THE SECOND TIME OF ASKING 


161 


hi in a greater chance of success with her. But, as it was, she knew 
to-day, if she had never known it before, that a man’s love for a 
woman may be the heaviest burden she can bear, and crush to the 
very earth one whom it was intended to uplift to heaven. 

“ I do not look at it from that point of view,” repeated Lewis, 
without even the semblance of a smile upon his square, resolute 
face. “ The right is yours, Miss Merry weather, if you will take it. 
My uncle would gladly be more than an uncle to you if you would 
let him.” 

There was a moment’s pause. She could not pretend to misun- 
derstand him, and perhaps each of them was secretly glad to be re- 
lieved from any further necessity for beating about the bush. 

The narrow cabin table divided them. They sat and faced each 
other in perfect silence — the expression in his steely gray eyes be- 
ing one of indescribable hunger, to which his thin, compressed lips 
almost seemed to give the lie. 

It was this strange contradiction in Mr. Lewis which had in the 
first instance excited Pearl’s interest, and which afterwards ren- 
dered her so little inclined to obey her aunt’s warning, and to 
“ leave him alone in future.” 

The eyes attracted her, weak and blinking as they were ; the 
mouth repelled her. She was moved sometimes to compassion, 
sometimes to a vague fear ; never to tenderness. To-day, as was 
not unnatural, her feelings of compassion were uppermost, and, in 
the eyes of the man who sat watching her and waiting for an an- 
swer, she had never looked so irresistible. 

“ I think,” said Pearl, at last, after an interval that seemed long 
to both of them, “ your uncle understands — that I cannot.” 

“ He is very unwilling to believe that you cannot — as unwilling 
as I am myself. No, that’s impossible — but, Miss Merry weather, 
you know my story. You know that unhappily I made one woman 
miserable. Forgive me if I importune you, but is it — is it for that 
reason that you refuse to let me try to make you happy ?” 

“ No, no. How can you think so ? It is nothing that I have 
heard, and, besides, no one has told me that you made any one 
miserable.” 

“ But I did. I tell you so myself for once and all. I made my 
wife most miserable, and yet God is my witness that I would rather 
live lonely for the rest of my days than ask you to marry me if I 
did not think that I should make you happy.” 

“ I am sure, I know, that you would be only too good to me,” 
11 


162 


THE PRICE OF A PEARL 


murmured Pearl, feeling that her task this time was harder than 
before, because she knew better what it was that he would fain have 
bestowed, and that she could not reciprocate. 

A momentary smile flitted across his grave face at the notion of 
his being good to her. 

“ Miss Merry weather, I am sensible that I cut a very poor figure 
at this kind of thing. Nature evidently never intended me to play 
the part of a lover. Yet I believe, in spite of my former failure, 
that I could, as you express it, be good to my wife. I know that I 
could sacrifice myself for her, and be to her all that a husband 
might be, but perhaps seldom is.” 

He held his peace for a while, but she remained silent. It was 
not easy to answer him, and, besides, he hardly seemed for the mo- 
ment to want an answer. Speak he must, now, fully and clearly, 
if he never after said a word to her that the whole world might 
not hear. 

This she felt, and could not find it in her heart to check him, al- 
though her silence might by some men have been taken for consent. 

Presently he spoke again, this time more urgently. 

“You may think, perhaps — it belongs to your age to think — 
that, when one has had an experience like mine, there is no room 
in one’s heart for a devotion of the sort that you have a right to 
expect. Perhaps you may imagine that it is only the dregs of 
love I am offering you?” 

“ Such an idea never crossed my mind for one moment,” she 
assured him truthfully. 

“ It need not. What I feel now I never have felt before, and 
never shall again — or, rather, I shall always feel it. It is part of 
my life, and will only die with me.” 

Even so late as yesterday she might have been secretly elated 
by this tribute to' her power. To-day she was only humbled. 
Who was she, what was she, Hiat she should be thus beloved by 
two men w 7 ho, however radically they might differ in their passion 
and in their manner of wooing, were alike in this : that each was 
pure and each unworldly ? Almost it might have seemed as if his 
next words were addressed to her unspoken thoughts. 

“ I will not tell you,” he said, with a half-smile that seemed to 
make his sad eyes sadder, “that you are the best woman I have 
ever known.” 

“ I hope not, indeed, for I should think you had never known a 
good one.” 


FOR THE SECOND TIME OF ASKING 


163 


But, though she spoke lightly, the tears were not far off, and 
she wished at that moment that her influence upon the lives of 
men was more of a sort to turn their thoughts towards heaven. 
As it was, she knew — she could not but know — that the best of 
them were only chained to earth. 

“ There is one other thing I must say. I do not know if it will 
weigh with you. I have much to regret in my past life, as I think 
you must be aware ; but, thank God, there is nothing of which my 
wife, if I ever have one, need be ashamed.” 

“ You need not tell me that,” said Pearl, quietly ; “ but I wish, I 
hope and pray that your wife, Mr. Lewis, may be a better woman 
than I shall ever be.” 

He shook his head. 

“ If you will not be my wife, I shall never marry.” 

She put out her hand with an imploring gesture. 

“ Have I not spoken plainly enough this time ? Oh, forgive 
me, if you can.” 

“ You need not say anything more,” he answered, heavily. “ God 
help me ! I don’t know why I should have expected a different 
answer.” 

He did not mean to reproach her, but she felt herself reproached, 
and knew that she was largely responsible for the mute anguish 
that she was compelled to witness. She might avert her eyes, and 
did, but she could not shut out from them the vision of that set 
gray face, with its furrowed brow and stern mouth, the nether lip 
of which was being fiercely gnawed under the shelter of the thick, 
grizzled mustache. 

“Have I lost my best friend?” she asked him presently, in a 
low, broken tone which betrayed that she was weeping. 

“God forbid! If you still count me as such, and if I can ever 
serve you or yours, I will.” 

“It’s not that,” she exclaimed, impulsively ; “I was not thinking 
of anything you could do for me, but — I like you so much, Mr. 
Lewis — if only — you would not ask me — I mean — if we could 
be friends, as people are friends sometimes, without thinking of 
anything else. That has happened surely ?” 

“ I believe it has,” he answered, dryly. “ I have always won- 
dered myself what the man was made of.” 

Her face fell slightly. Both the words and the tone in which 
they were uttered administered a slight shock to her vanity. She 
had thought to retain her lover under the specious title of friend 


164 


THE PRICE OF A PEARL 


while rejecting his love, hut it appeared that there were two sides 
to that question, and that her power over him was less unlimited 
than she had imagined. It followed, as a matter of course, that 
her respect for him was instantly and powerfully increased. 

“You have a right to be angry,” she said, humbly, “and I do 
not deserve your friendship.” 

“ Miss Merryweather, as I said before, if friendship means ser- 
vice, then I am your friend, and as long as you remain unmarried 
I shall be able to meet you, I hope, without flinching, certainly 
without giving annoyance to you, or food for gossip to the world. 
But if, as has been suggested to me, I have a successful rival, and 
you have given him, or are going to give him, what you say you 
cannot give to me, then I tell you honestly friendship in your 
sense of the word is impossible, and I can only pray that I may 
never look upon your face again.” 

“ I had hoped,” said Pearl, after a long pause, in which her 
wounded self-love and her innate sense of justice struggled for the 
mastery, “ that you would have been more generous.” 

“ A man can seldom feel generous to one who has supplanted 
him. I know now, though you have not told me so, that I am 
supplanted, and I am not vain enough to be greatly astonished. 
But, though I wish you e/ery happiness in the whole world, I con- 
fess that I can’t bring myself to look on it with pleasure.” 

“Supplanted is not the word,” faltered Pearl, desirous even 
now of keeping within the circle of her life this lover who refused 
her friendship. 

“ Pardon me, I think it is the word. One month ago I had it 
from your own lips that — there was no one else. You will not 
say that now, Miss Merryweather ?” 

“ It was true then ; it was, indeed.” 

“Yes, but not now,” persisted Lewis. 

“ Not now,” she admitted, with one of her rare blushes. 

He was merciful enough to look away while the unruly blood 
tided up into her fair face, telling of some powerful emotion 
which no words of his had ever awakened. 

“ That being so,” he said, very quietly, “ I can only stand aside 
and let you pass. You never can be more happy in this world 
than I wish you to be, or would have tried to make you. I think 
you know that.” 

“ You would make me more happy than I can say if you would 
let me feel that I had not forfeited your friendship, Mr. Lewis. 


FOR THE SECOND TIME OF ASKING 


165 


Do you forget that you promised it to me ? and I covet it not for 
myself alone.” 

“ I forget nothing that you have ever said to me, or that I have 
ever said to you. If I can at any time help you in any way, com- 
mand me. I will spare no pains to be of service to you or to any 
one for whom you care. But in your happiness you will not want 
me — you ought not to want me, and I do not choose to go where I 
am not wanted.” 

He rose as he spoke, and held out his hand across the narrow 
space dividing them. It was a strange ending to a strange inter- 
view, in which, for the first time in her whole life, Pearl felt her- 
self vanquished. She had rejected him, and yet he had shown 
himself her master. He loved her, perhaps would never cease to 
love her to his dying day, but she could not swerve him by a 
hair’s-breadth from his purpose. He neither judged nor con- 
demned her, but the iron strength of his will was like a touch- 
stone to her own, and she stood before him as she had stood be- 
fore Hector, self-judged and self-condemned. When they parted 
that June evening in the sight of the inquisitive assembly, no 
human being who stood by and watched them could have guessed 
that for the second time of asking the rich banker’s dearest hope 
had been disappointed. 

Only Bertie Meredith was quick enough to discern the truth, 
and to place the right interpretation, on Pearl’s heavy eyes and 
downcast looks. The rest of the world opined, not without some 
show of reason, that Miss Merryweather was a shameful flirt, and 
that if, after this day’s proceedings, her wealthy lover chose to 
leave her in the lurch, she would only have herself to blame. 


CHAPTER IX 


ON THE BEST AUTHORITY 


“Oui, sans doute tout meurt, ce monde est un grand rove, 

Et le peu de bonheur qui nous vient en chemin, 

Nous n’avons pas plus tot ce roseau dans la main, 

Que le vent nous l’enl&ve.” 

Pearl’s sleep that night was restless and broken, and her 
dreams were haunted ceaselessly by two figures w r hich came and 
went and changed their roles with the bewildering rapidity pecul- 
iar to the realms of slumber. Sometimes it seemed that she be- 
longed to Hector, but there was no sense of security in her rejoic- 
ing ; and sometimes she felt herself bound by a solemn vow to Mr. 
Lewis, whose sad eyes appeared yet to reproach her for some 
secret treachery. 

At one moment she fancied herself on board a sinking vessel, 
and Mr. Lewis’s arms were round her, dragging her down with a 
merciless force to the slimy weeds beneath the waters. She felt 
the chill rush of the wave as it surged over her stiffened limbs, 
but in the same instant Hector’s voice called her Andromache, and 
Hector’s strong hand was grasping hers and pulling her on shore. 
But when, breathless and exhausted, she lay at last in safety, her 
eyes encountered only the mocking glance and the sneering smile 
of Mrs. Mandeville. 

She awoke with a start to find that it was broad daylight, and 
the bells of the various city churches were ringing for the early 
morning service. 

Pearl had heard them all her life, and, if the truth must be told, 
they had fallen on unheeding ears. To-day they seemed laden 
with a new meaning, to bear her a new message, and to call upon 
her in urgent tones to begin at once that new life which at no 
time seems so possible as when looked at in the light of a first 
love. 

She remembered her neglected Sabbaths, her lifeless prayers, 
her wandering thoughts. What wonder that the world w T as always 


ON THE BEST AUTHORITY 


167 


with her, since she had never sought to shut it out, even at the 
most solemn moments ? Of what avail was her passive assent to a 
faith which it would have been considered bad taste to deny, but 
which assuredly had been barren hitherto in her life alike of high 
thoughts or of noble actions ! 

Surely religion, which for her was a mere dead letter, meant 
something more than this to the two men who had, each in his 
own language and after his own manner, revealed to her yesterday 
the secrets of their hearts ! 

If there be not somewhat of the divine in human love, what is 
to raise it above the level of the beasts that perish? She felt, 
for the first time, the need of some guarantee against the earthly 
and the temporal, and knew that without it Hector’s love, though 
sweet beyond all previous experience, was not enough to fill her 
heart. 

The bells gradually died away into silence, and one by one the 
city clocks struck eight— the hour when, as Hector had told her, 
he expected to meet his father. Not certainly an hour at which a 
lady is usually supposed to receive a visit from a gentleman ; but 
it so happened to-day that, before the last clock had done striking, 
Pearl’s maid brought in a message from Lord Bertie Meredith to 
know when she would be able to see him. 

“ Lord Bertie here ! at this hour of the morning ! What can 
have happened ?” exclaimed Pearl, in utter amazement. 

But this was not a question to which the highly respectable 
British abigail, appointed by Lady Dalrymple to wait on Miss 
Merryweather, could be expected to return a very satisfactory 
answer; although, if one might judge by her somewhat severe as- 
pect, she had her own opinion on the subject, and it was not 
entirely favorable to Miss Merryweather. 

She did not protest, but her manner was eloquent when Pearl 
sent her back to the drawing-room with a politely-worded request 
that Lord Herbert would breakfast with herself and the arch- 
deacon. 

The invitation was, however, declined. Lord Herbert, it ap- 
peared, had breakfasted already ; he was about to leave Fingall by 
an early train, and wished much to speak to Miss Merryweather 
before starting. 

There was nothing for it but to get up and dress as quickly as 
possible, which Pearl accordingly did with many wondering con- 
jectures as to the motive of Lord Bertie’s singular behavior. 


168 


THE PRICE OF A PEARL 


Once before, indeed, be bad made his appearance at an equally 
unearthly hour on an errand which no one suspected, and which 
Pearl had never revealed to mortal, aware, doubtless, that she had 
brought his visit on herself. Not, indeed, that any one had ever 
expected her to marry poor Bertie ; but, as she well knew, she 
need never have placed herself in the position of being obliged to 
refuse him. 

“ It cannot be anything of that sort now,” she reflected, anx- 
iously, when she at last went down to him, looking, in spite of her 
restless night and broken slumbers, like a pure white lily newly 
washed with dew. 

No, it was certainly nothing of that sort. 

Bertie, who had been sitting in an ungainly attitude on the low- 
est chair in the room, hastily unfolded his long legs as the door 
opened, and appeared to have just done getting up by the time that 
Pearl had closed it. 

“ Pm awfully sorry to have disturbed you at such an hour,” he 
said, seeing that the expression of the girl’s face as she held out her 
hand was interrogative, “ but the fact is — MacAdam is in trouble, 
and so — ” 

“ Then he is not gone, after all ?” and, even if the eager tone had 
not betrayed Pearl’s secret, Lord Bertie would have known it by 
the unconsciously convulsive clasp of her fingers. 

“ He is gone, but when I went home last night to our rooms I 
found this.” 

He held out a telegraph form as he spoke, and her eyes rapidly 
took in the few words contained in it : 

“ Your father is seriously ill. Come at once." 

“ Oh !” exclaimed Pearl, looking up at him impulsively, as though 
quite sure beforehand of his sympathy. “ He said he had been ill 
in his letter.” 

“Yes,” said Bertie, very quietly, “he said so.” 

Their eyes met, and she perceived, with some confusion, that his 
were full of meaning. He hastened to explain himself. 

“ Of course you understand, Miss Merry weather, that if I had not 
known pretty well what MacAdam’s hopes were, I should have no 
business here to-day ?” 

Pearl inclined her head in silence. 

u But as it is,” continued Bertie, “ knowing that the poor fellow 
was in trouble, it seemed to me that you ought to know it too. 
Am I taking too much for granted ?” 


ON THE BEST AUTHORITY 


169 


“ No,” she answered, with a dignified simplicity for which lie 
had not given her credit. “ I do not say you are.” 

“ That means, then,” he said, after an instant’s pause, “ that I 
am to congratulate you, Miss Merry weather ?” 

“ It will be very kind and generous of you, Lord Bertie, if 
you do.” 

She could scarcely have hit upon an answer more calculated to 
soothe his wounded feelings and convey to him at once, without 
forfeiture of her own self-respect, and without disloyalty to Hec- 
tor, her sense of the wrong that he had once suffered at her hands. 

He could not fail to understand her meaning, and yet the only 
expression that she could discern in his odd, squinting eyes as he 
stood looking down at her was one of the deepest compassion. 

“ People have begun to talk,” he said, even more abruptly than 
usual ; “ I suppose you are aware of that ?” 

“ It is a gantlet that one has to run in Fingall, isn’t it ?” she 
answered, lightly. 

“ You must be well used to it by this time, I know ; hut — in 
this case, you see — there are peculiar circumstances, and I think, 
perhaps, you ought to he put upon your guard against a certain 
lady whose name I need hardly mention.” 

“ Thanks,” said Pearl, quietly; “ I am aware that she is not my 
friend, hut in this particular instance I don’t think her enmity can 
do me much harm.” 

“ Miss Merryweather, please don’t he too sure of that. One 
reason why I have come here to-day is that I overheard the said 
lady yesterday very busy with MacAdam’s name, and you and I 
know enough of her to be sure that anything she hears about him, 
true or false, will lose nothing in the repeating.” 

“ Still, I can see no reason why either he or I should he afraid 
of her. At the worst, what can she do but cause our affairs to he 
discussed a little earlier than we intended ? You don’t think, Lord 
Bertie, that I am ashamed of my engagement?” 

By the tone of her voice and the sudden lifting of her head he 
knew that she was very proud, as well as strangely humble, and he 
was sensible of a sudden tightening of his throat, which made his 
next words sound rather suspiciously husky. 

“ If Mrs. Mandeville has nothing worse to tell than that, none of 
us need fear her.” 

“And I suppose,” continued Pearl, with kindling eyes, “that 
Mrs. Mandeville cannot say anything against — ” 


170 


THE PRICE OP A PEARL 


“Against MacAdam ? Hardly. He is one of the Nathanaels of 
the earth.” 

“ Then why are you anxious ?” said the girl, more gently. 

“ Because, unfortunately, she has got hold of a story which will 
certainly do him no good with — with your friends, Miss Merry- 
weather.” 

’ “ What do you mean ?” 

Pearl’s lips had whitened, and her breath had quickened. Her 
vague, nameless fears of yesterday returned in full force. 

Bertie hesitated painfully. 

“ It is very hard to tell you,” he said, in a low voice and with 
averted eyes. 

“Some one will tell me, and more unkindly than you would. I 
shall not be spared, Lord Bertie ; of that you may be certain.” 

“ I am afraid you won’t, but that doesn’t make it easier 
for me.” 

“ But is it true ?” urged the girl, in a tone that went to his heart, 
so eloquent was it of her newly-born tenderness for Hector. 

Again he hesitated. 

“You wonder, perhaps, how I come to know anything. I did 
not until yesterday.” 

“ How did she know ? What does she know ? Please, please 
tell me.” 

Was it Pearl who was really pleading with liim like this — the 
soulless, heartless maiden who had first beguiled and then rejected 
him ? Truly, love was teaching her strange lessons. 

“ I will tell yon all I can,” he said, in a low, hurried murmur, as 
if he were conning some unwelcome task. “ I sat near her on the 
deck yesterday, when you were with — ” 

“ Yes, yes, I know.” 

“ It seems that MacAdam had dined with her the night before, 
and among her guests was some Indian official who had known his 
father, and also his mother. As far as I could make out from Mrs. 
Mandeville’s conversation, this gentleman was her authority for the 
story which I heard her telling to her friend.” 

“ But do you believe it ?” cried Pearl, scornfully. “ One knows 
what Indian gossip is.” 

“ So little did I believe it that I at once contradicted it rather, 

I fancy, to Mrs. Mandeville’s astonishment, for she had not sup- 
posed that I was listening to her story. She persisted, however, 
in what she had said, declared that she had the best authority for 


ON T1IE BEST AUTHORITY 


171 


her statements, and further expressed her opinion that Lady Dal- 
rymple and your father ought to know the truth.” 

“ How dare she ? how dare she ?” said Pearl, in a white heat of 
anger, for which he could hardly find it in his heart to blame her. 

“ Perhaps, after all, she will not dare, but — you know what Fin- 
gall is, Miss Merry weather, even better than I do ; you know how 
soon a piece of gossip gets wind. I was determined to spoil her 
game if possible, and when the party broke up last evening, and 
you had all gone home, I stayed behind to speak with — our host !” 

“ Why with him murmured Pearl, in a scarcely audible whisper. 

“ He had asked me several questions about MacAdam earlier in 
the afternoon. He said he knew his mother’s family, although he 
had never met herself, and he seemed very much interested in all I 
could tell him about her. He asked about the other brother, too, 
the one who was drowned at Oxford. I dare say you have heard 
of him?” 

“But what has this to do — ” began Pearl, excitedly, “with 
what — ” 

“With what that woman said? Only this, that I felt sure he 
would be able to throw light on the subject, as he evidently knew 
something of MacAdam’s family. So I told him what she — what I 
had heard, and I asked him to let me contradict it on his authority.” 

“ Go on,” whispered Pearl, seeing that he halted, and that his 
face was again working painfully. “ Is he my enemy, too ?” 

“ You would not say that if you had seen his face when I made 
that appeal to him. It was as white as yours is now, and I could 
have almost sworn that there were tears in his eyes, only he gives 
one no chance of ever seeing them.” 

There was an agonized movement of impatience from Pearl. 

“ What did he say ?” 

“ He said that the story could not be contradicted, but that he 
had hoped it was not known — at all events, in this country.” 

“ What is the story ?” 

Her voice was still a whisper, and her trembling lips could 
scarcely frame the question. Even as it left them, she thought of 
that strange letter she had read yesterday, with its guarded tone, 
its covert allusions, its measured expressions. Yes, there was a 
story. Too truly had she read between the lines some mystery 
which had escaped her lover. It was his unsuspecting guileless- 
ness, not her own chill misgivings, that had been, after all, at fault. 

“ Excuse me for one moment.” 


172 


THE PRICE OF A PEARL 


She watched him in a dazed manner while he slowly picked 
himself up from the sofa, walked across the room, and took down 
a large red book from one of the shelves. 

“You have none later than this?” he said, turning to the title- 
page, which bore a date of five years hack. 

She shook her head. What in the name of Heaven did he 
want with the “ County Families of Great Britain and Ireland ” ? 

His long bony fingers turned the pages rapidly. 

“ This was compiled before the father came in for the property, 
when his nephew had it. Still, I suppose he will be down among 
the younger brothers of the last man. Yes, here he is.” 

Lord Bertie closed the big volume, keeping one of his fingers 
between its pages to serve as a marker, and then looked earnestly 
at Miss Merry weather. 

So long did he gaze at her, and so obstinately did his lips keep 
silence, that she began to wonder if she were not indeed dreaming, 
and if all this strange scene were not part and parcel of her last 
night’s chaotic visions. 

“Mac Adam was born in December, 1850,” he said, abruptly, 
and then walked over to the window, leaving the book open on 
the sofa beside Pearl. 

Mechanically she leaned over it, and her eyes, travelling swiftly 
up and down the page, lighted on these words : 

“ 6. Hector, born April, 1815 ; married, Jan., 1851, Theresa, elder 
daughter of George Armytage, Captain — th Inf., and has issue.” 

It was not at first that Pearl took in the full significance of this 
entry when read in connection with Lord Bertie’s last utterance. 
Twice or three times she went over it before it dawned upon her 
mind of what nature this story that Mr. Lewis had vouched for, 
that Mrs. Mandeville had got hold of, really was. 

When at last she understood a low cry broke from her, and the 
book fell heavily upon the floor. 

“ My God !” she exclaimed, in her new and unfamiliar anguish. 
“ My God !” 

The next moment she had looked up in terror lest her move- 
ment of despair had been witnessed. But Lord Bertie was merci- 
ful, and the room was empty. He had left her alone with her 
misery. 


CHAPTER X 


NO PLACE FOR REPENTANCE 

“Is ever a lament begun, 

By any mourner under sun, 

Which, ere it endeth, suits but one P* 

The hours of that June night, which to Pearl were so broken 
by disturbing dreams and fragmentary visions, had passed almost 
unperceived by Hector MacAdam. 

Though his eyes were closed, his heart kept vigil, and his body 
was as independent of slumber as his spirit of time or distance. 
In truth, he was in that stage of romantic passion which knows 
not solitude. His very personality seemed to him doubled by the 
secret consciousness of his love and his strange communion of spirit 
with her whom he regarded, rightly or wrongly, as his second self. 

All night long he mused blissfully, alike on the brief past com- 
mon to them both, which yet seemed to have incorporated itself 
already with the whole of his previous existence, and on the long 
future which they were to share together, when in the words of 
Scripture “ they should be no more twain, but one flesh.” And, if 
Pearl had been beside him, he could hardly have spoken to her 
more fervently of all that he meant to be and do and dare for 
her beloved sake, than he did during the watches of that summer 
night, which his fellow-travellers found so long and tedious, while 
to him they passed away as swiftly as the morning mists vanish 
before the rising sun. 

Yesterday had given place to to-day, and the new day was al- 
ready some hours old w'hen Hector’s train steamed into the small 
wayside station of Adamsford, distant from his own home by 
about a couple of miles. He had intended to walk these, being 
well acquainted with certain stringent regulations which obtained 
at Adamscourt in regard to the Sabbath.* His astonishment was 
therefore extreme when he caught sight of the MacAdam livery, 
and the Adamscourt footman, touching his hat very respectfully, 
coming forward from the farther end of the platform. 


174 


THE PRICE OF A PEARL 


“ The brougham is outside, sir, but Dr. Frazer thought it might 
be better to wait for the Edinburgh train, in case the other gentle- 
man had been able to come by it.” 

“ What other gentleman ?” asked Hector, thoroughly perplexed 
at this unexpected turn of events. 

“ The doctor, sir, from Edinburgh — Dr. Frazer telegraphed for 
him, sir, last night.” 

Hector uttered an exclamation of dismay. 

“ Is your master ill ? What has happened ? I have heard noth- 
ing,” he said, quickly. 

It was now the footman’s turn to look astonished. 

“ I made sure, sir, when I saw you, that you had received Dr. 
Frazer’s telegram. He hoped, I know, sir, that you would get it 
in time to catch the train as how you’ve just come by, sir.” 

A moment’s silent reflection showed Hector precisely what had 
happened. He had sent his bag beforehand to. the Fingall termi- 
nus, and gone thither direct himself from the Druid’s Glen with- 
out returning to his own rooms. 

“ I have heard nothing,” he repeated. “ What — what is the mat- 
ter with your master ?” 

“ Some sort of a stroke, sir, the doctor seemed to think it. He 
hasn’t taken no notice of any one, not since yesterday about noon, 
when the butler found him on the floor of the study.” 

Hector shuddered as he remembered those few words in his 
father’s letter, so little dwelt on at the time, so entirely unthought 
of ever since: 

“ I have been ill, or you should have heard from me before 
this.” 

Was this to be the meeting, then, at once so desired and so 
dreaded, on which so much was to depend ? Was the silence of 
death to succeed that long silence of misunderstanding, which 
ever since his earliest recollection had subsisted between himself 
and his father ? 

To some sons — not bad ones either, as the world counts them — 
the possibility might have been fraught with a secret sense of relief. 
To Hector it brought only a sharp pang of bitter sorrow. 

“ If I could only tell him about her ! if only he could know her ! 
She would have made everything straight between him and me.” 

So he reflected mournfully as he realized the sudden abyss that 
had already opened up between the past and present. Then, 
turning to the footman : 


NO PLACE FOR REPENTANCE 


175 


“ You liad better wait here with the brougham for the Edin- 
burgh train. I shall go up to the house on foot. Of course Dr. 
Frazer is there ?” 

“ Oh yes, sir, he’s been there all night. There’s no change this 
morning, sir. That was what I was to say if I was asked any 
questions.” 

No change. Perhaps there would be no change, one way or the 
.other, until that final one which heralds death. 

So the doctor told Hector. So, for the rest, he could tell him- 
self — his own professional training being by no means superficial, 
and his theoretical knowledge of medicine considerable. 

As for the cause of this sudden stroke, no one could enlighten 
him. His father had been ill for two or three days in the previous 
week, but not seriously so — not enough, in fact, to warrant Hector 
being sent for, against the very decided negative of the patient 
himself, when the idea was suggested to him. 

“ Then he seemed to get all right again,” continued the doctor ; 
“ wrote several letters, his man tells me, on Thursday, and rode over 
on Friday to the manse, where I believe they kept him to early 
dinner. He was just like himself yesterday morning, and gave 
orders for your room to be got ready ; but a little after twelve I 
was sent for, and I have been with him ever since. In your ab- 
sence, of course, I took it upon myself to telegraph for the best 
advice that was to be had.” 

“ Of course,” echoed Hector, mechanically ; but, even as he said 
it, he realized with a desperate sinking of the heart how vain was 
the help of man. 

What could the most skilled physician in Edinburgh tell him 
that he did not know already ? What could he prescribe that had 
not been tried already, and tried alas ! in vain ? 

There had been times of late when the young medical student, 
after witnessing some more than ordinarily skilful feat on the 
part of the great Fingall surgeons, had gloried in the thought of 
entering a profession which gave to man such marvellous powers 
of healing and restoring his fellow-creatures. 

He felt no pride in it to-day. All the science of medicine, 
all the skill of surgery, seemed but a vain groping in the dark, 
a blind and futile struggle with some relentless power which 
took no account either of human weakness or of human en- 
deavor. 

In a dumb stupor of unfamiliar sorrow he wandered about at in- 


176 


THE PRICE OF A PEARL 


tervals over the great empty house, which to him had never been in 
any sense like home. 

Sad associations he had had with it in plenty: as when his dead 
brother had been brought there for burial in the family vault, 
where but a little while later their gentle mother was laid beside him. 

But times of mirth and of rejoicing Hector had never known in 
.this abode of his forefathers, those gloomy, hard-featured, stern- 
browed soldiers whose portraits gazed down at him now from the # 
dark wainscoted walls with coldly questioning eyes that recalled 
those of his silent father. 

“It is strange,” he thought, sadly. “My father had a right to 
feel at home here; yet I remember he showed no pleasure in com- 
ing back, and the place never seems to have brought us any happi- 
ness.” 

He next visited the study, summoning the butler, who had lived 
for upwards of a score of years in the family, to tell him the ex- 
act circumstances of his father’s seizure. 

“ Do you think he has been worried, Stewart ?” he asked, anx- 
iously, for the misgiving had already obtruded itself that perhaps 
his own letter might have been instrumental in bringing about the 
present mournful state of things. 

“Well, Mr. Hector, I won’t say but what he did seem to take 
things to heart like more than hfe used before the mistress died. 
But there, that was not to be wondered at either ; and then your 
going away, sir — that fretted him a good deal, I think.” 

“ Did it really ?” asked Hector, divided between remorse and 
amazement at this piece of intelligence. “I never would have 
gone if I had thought that my father wished me to stay.” 

“ Well, sir, it may be only my fancy, but I think he wanted you 
every hour of the day. And yet when it was a question of send- 
ing for you he wouldn’t hear of it, said that you’d only be in the 
way, and he wasn’t going to die— not yet a while, at all events. 
He heard from you, I think, sir, early in the week ?” 

“ Yes,” said Hector, eagerly. “ Did he— was that— I mean, do 
you suppose that he worried himself particularly over my letter ?” 

The old butler hesitated, and there was a mixture of benevolence 
and embarrassment in his manner as he made answer. 

“Well, Mr. Hector, if I didn’t know you so well as I do, I 
should have thought you had been getting into some scrape from 
the way the poor master tramped up and down the hall that 
morning.” 


NO PLACE FOR REPENTANCE 


177 

Hector’s blusli could not have been more vivid if he had been 
detected in a forgery. 

“ There was nothing in my letter that should have put him out 
as much as that, Stewart — there was not indeed; and, besides, he 
seemed all right afterwards, so Dr. Frazer tells me.” 

“ Oh yes, sir, quite right he was yesterday morning, and told 
us you were coming. We thought everything had blown over 
then, but on the Toosday he did seem strange, sir — didn’t speak like 
himself at all. I shouldn’t like you to have heard him. It was al- 
most as if he had gone off his head.” 

“ What did he say ?” asked Hector, amazed beyond measure 
that his letter should have had so strange an effect on one who 
had answered it with such apparent composure. 

“ Well, really, Mr. Hector, I hardly like to tell you, only that 
I don’t suppose he knew what he was saying.” And again the 
faithful retainer hesitated painfully. 

“ Please tell me what he said, Stewart,” said his young master, 
in a tone of quiet authority worthy of his anc 3stry. 

“ He said, sir, he kept on saying, Sven when the footmen were 
in the room, something about his sin having found him out.” 

Stewart’s voice had dropped to a whisper, and he was looking 
about him, the heavy closed door notwithstanding, as if in fear- 
ful apprehension of being overheard. 

“ What could he have meant?” muttered Hector, uneasily. 

“ I don’t believe he knew himself, sir; it was just that he was 
a bit odd that morning. Don’t you take on, Mr. Hector, about 
it. He was quite like himself yesterday, and please God he will 
be again, no matter what the doctors say with their long faces.” 

The old man spoke reassuringly, but his words fell on unheed- 
ing ears. Hector had taken out his father’s last letter, and in the 
new light shed upon it by what he had just heard, he was ear- 
nestly restudying its contents. 

What did it mean, that enigmatical sentence at the close, in 
which his father alluded to “ certain family matters, on which, for 
reasons of his own, he had hitherto been silent ” ? Could it be that 
he had discovered a flaw in the inheritance, that some unknown 
member of the family had put in his just claim to the estate of Ad- 
amscourt, and that Hector’s father was, after all, only an interloper ? 

No other solution of the problem occurred to him; and that did 
but suggest itself to be instantly dismissed as unworthy at once 
of his father and of his father’s ancient race, 

19 


178 


THE PRICE OF A PEARL 


The young man had never, as the saying is, “got on” with 
his father, but he was not for that reason a whit less loyal in his 
sonship. 

A message from the sick-room summoned him away from any 
further self-communing, and at the door he was met by Dr. Frazer. 

“Your father is conscious,” he whispered, rapidly. “ We fancy 
, that it is you whom he wants, but unfortunately he can’t express 
himself* Perhaps you may be able to understand him.” 

“ Perhaps I may ; but I think I had better be alone with him. 
If you would stay within reach — ” 

“ Of course. I understand. You will know what to do, and 
be able to ease his mind.” 

But that, alas ! lay beyond human power. No scene in the whole 
of his after-life ever impressed poor Hector so painfully as this, 
when his dying father lay before him conscious, but powerless — 
limbs and tongue alike paralyzed, but memory and conscience 
awake, and despair stamped on every feature of the deathly pal- 
lid face. 

“ You know me, father ?” And the young man bent down ten- 
derly to listen for the answer. 

But none came ; only a despairing glance round the room, and 
a feeble parting of the blue lips showed that the long recumbent 
form was other than an inanimate corpse. Kneeling down beside 
the beci Hector said, imploringly : 

“ Is there anything you want done — any wrong to be set right ? 
Will it comfort you to know that I will spare no pains to carry 
out your wishes, whatever they may be ?” 

No answer, but the eyes that met his were sad as death and 
hopeless as the grave. 

“ Have I vexed you, father?” 

Rightly or wrongly, he fancied that there was a faint movement 
of denial, and his heart leaped with gratitude. 

“ Are you afraid I shall do anything rash or foolish about — 
about what I told you in my letter? It is not that , father, is it, 
which is weighing on your mind ?” 

Again he was baffled; again the only answer was a fixed and 
hopeless stare. 

“ There was something you wanted to tell me — that you thought 
I ought to know ?” 

The lips parted slowly, but no sound issued from them. For 
“reasons of his own” he had been silent hitherto. Henceforth 


NO PLACE FOR REPENTANCE 


179 


silence was laid upon him. Silently he had lived, silently he must 
die, bearing down with him to the grave that untold secret which 
was already whispering away his wife’s fair fame and his son’s 
inheritance. There was no place for repentance. 

Prayers were offered up beside his bed, but whether he followed 
them or not who could tell ? The tide of life ebbed slowly out, 
but no one knew the exact moment at which the last faint ripple 
beat upon the shores of time. Father and son had had their final 
interview, and to the end it seemed to poor Hector as if they had 
been fated not to understand each other. 

But when his friend arrived at the close of the day, in haste to 
give him help and sympathy, he saw by the very simplicity of 
Hector’s boyish sorrow that the worst was yet to come ; that the 
bitter truth was still unknown to him, and that, in all his boyish 
thoughts of his dead father, there was no shadow of that deep, 
silent resentment which makes the heart that harbors it a living 
hell. 

“And yet,” thought Bertie, sadly, as he waited for what the 
morrow should bring forth, “ if one has never been in hell, can 
one really know heaven ?” 

He who had known the one still looked for the other, both for 
himself and for his friend. 


CHAPTER XI 


OVER THE TEA-CUPS 

“Being observed, 

When observation is not sympathy, 

Is just being tortured.” 

Lady Dalrymple was “ at home ” for the last time in the sum- 
mer season of this year of grace, 187—. Not till far on in the 
autumn would the Fingall beau monde have any further opportunity 
of gathering in her luxuriously-furnished rooms, of accepting with 
sublime impartiality her snubs, her lectures, and her patronage, of 
eating her salt, and withal of abusing herself. To be sure, her 
coming absence would be no hinderance to the full indulgence of 
the last-named proclivity. 

Accordingly, the name of her visitors to-day was legion. The 
two big rooms were full to overflowing, full as they had been on 
the night of Hector’s first appearance in Fingall society, and now, 
as then, he himself was the one absorbing topic of conversation. 

Each new-comer brought a new story, and retailed it pro bono 
publico — Lady Dalrymple listening to all alike with the same veiled 
smile of half-polite, wholly cynical amusement, which rendered cer- 
tain of the more sensitive among her visitors doubtful as to whether 
she believed any. 

It was not, however, incredulity to which this smile was intended 
to serve as a mask, but rather vigilance — a vigilance that nothing 
was suffered to escape, that took full as much secret note of accent 
and intonation as of word and phrase, and that included her god- 
daughter’s frequent changes of color and countenance, no less than 
the expressive glances interchanged from time to time by her 
guests. 

In every sentence addressed to these latter she was pointedly 
aiming at Pearl, as the girl herself perfectly understood ; and the 
more bland her speech, the more incisive was he-r real meaning to 
those who had the wit to discern it. 

“ Yes,” she said, suavely, “ it is unfortunate certainly, and it 


OVER THE TEA-CUPS 


181 


shows how careful one ought to be about people’s antecedents. 
But, after all, what was I to do ? — a friend of Lord Bertie Meredith, 
and everything ; and of course it never occurred to me to ask if his 
parents had been married.” 

“ Lord Bertie is with him now at Adamscourt,” some one ob- 
served, tentatively, anxious to discover if this was news to Lady 
Dalrymple. 

If it were, she exhibited no sign of astonishment — only remarked, 
with a gentle shrug, that poor Bertie was a veritable Don Quixote. 

“ Is it true that the poor young man is practically penniless as 
well as nameless ?” 

“ Probably. The father’s death seems quite sudden, but I don’t 
see that it matters so very much. The boy will, of course, turn to 
his profession, and I fancy he is by no means unintelligent.” 

“ Remarkably clever ” Lady Dalrymple had pronounced him only 
one short week ago ; but that, of course, was when he was the heir 
of Adamscourt. Pearl, who remembered this verdict, could not for- 
bear expressing her contempt for the present one by a curl of the 
lip, which her godmother secretly resented and resolved to avenge. 

“But who first set the story going?” demanded a second in- 
quisitive visitor. “For I heard it before Mr. MacAdam’s death 
was announced in the papers.” 

“ And so did I. And so did I,” declared a dozen other voices 
in the same breath. 

“ Need you ask ?” retorted her ladyship, with that pleasantry 
which stings like vitriol. “ Who hatches all the scandalous stories 
in the place ?” 

“ Mrs. Mandeville,” said the butler, and he was puzzled himself 
at the curious rustle of half-guilty amusement which followed his 
pompous announcement. How should he know, poor man, that 
he had, in vulgar parlance, hit the nail on the head, and supplied 
a marvellously correct answer to a very ill-natured question ? 

“ How do you do, dear Lady Dalrymple ? When I heard that 
it was your last day at home, I felt that I must positively make an 
effort and drive over, although, as you see, my poor arm is still in 
its cradle.” 

“ So I perceive,” said her hostess, in such singularly honeyed 
accents that every one looked up in full expectation of hearing 
something extra disagreeable— “ so I perceive, and I hear that you 
rewarded the poor man who set it for you by taking away his 
mother’s reputation.” 


182 


THE PRICE OF A PEARL 


“ My dear Lady Dalrymple, you do say the most extraordinary 
things ! Why, I have never even blamed poor Mrs. Mac Adam.” 

“Haven’t you really? Ah, well, you young Indian grass-widows 
allow yourselves a good deal of latitude, as we all know.” 

Mrs. Mandeville opened her eyes with an expression of innocent 
amazement. 

“ Have I said anything dreadful ? Not any tea, thank you, Miss 
Merry weather. Oh, what a becoming gown ! How well you are 
looking !” 

A speech which, of course, had the desired effect of directing 
general attention to Pearl, who, as she was well aware, was look- 
ing not her best, hut her very worst on this festive occasion. Lady 
Dalrymple had no mind, however, to let the conversation be di- 
verted into another channel. 

“You have not said anything dreadful,” she said, pointedly, “ but 
still I fear that you won’t get many people to agree with you in not 
blaming Mrs. Mac Adam. There is a slight prejudice in society 
still, you know, against run-away wives.” 

“ She had such a brute of a husband,” replied Mrs. Mandeville, 
with imperturbable composure. “ We poor women are really sadly 
handicapped when we have the misfortune to marry the wrong 
man.” 

“ I suppose that is so,” said her ladyship, meditatively ; “ and 
yet,” she added, with one of her meaning smiles, “ I must confess 
myself to having a sort of sneaking sympathy with the wrong 
man. No one ever seems to consider him in the' matter, and of 
course les absents ont toujours tort .” 

Mrs. Mandeville’s laugh was a little forced as she answered that, 
“ in the present instance, poor Mr. Mac Adam senior would appear 
to have married the right woman at the wrong time.” 

“How did you get hold of the story?” demanded her hostess, 
always with the same merciless display of her lovely artificial 
teeth. 

“ I fear I should be betraying confidence if I were to tell you 
that,” said the other, softly. “ Besides, to say the truth, I really 
thought that Miss Merryweather knew all about it. She quite 
looked as if she had something on her mind that Saturday evening.” 

Pearl was out of earshot, of course, or Mrs. Mandeville would 
hardly have permitted herself to say this ; but there were not want- 
ing tongues ready and willing to repeat the whole to her a little 
later, actuated less perhaps by wanton cruelty than by feminine 


OVER THE TEA CUPS 


183 


spite, for, after all, “Miss Merry weather did give herself such in- 
tolerable airs.” Lady Dalrymple, however, was more than prompt 
to take up the challenge. 

“ Poor child ! she had a good deal on her mind, as it happened. 

I suppose it is no secret by this time that she has refused Mr. 
Lewis.” 

There was a general movement of surprise, tempered with polite 
incredulity. A good many of Lady Dalrymple’s visitors had been 
allowing themselves to think if not to say that Mr. Lewis had 
definitely refused Miss Merryweather. 

“Yes, indeed,” pursued the old beldame, with the utmost pla- • 
cidity. “ He is in a dreadful state about it, poor man, and she 
is unhappy too at having caused him so much misery. I believe, 
if he were to come back now, she would accept him out of sheer 
compassion.” 

“Very likely,” murmured Mrs. Mandeville; “but what would 
poor Mr. Mac Adam say to that ?” 

The buttons were fairly off the foils now, and the two women 
glared at each other, the crowd looking on with breathless interest. 

“ You seem to imply,” said the elder, haughtily, “ that Mr. Mac- 
Adam would have some claim upon my niece ; but I am glad to be 
able to tell you that you are mistaken.” 

“ I am really very glad to hear it, Lady Dalrymple, for I assure 
you I was not at all alone on Saturday in my opinion that she 
must be engaged to him.” 

She glanced around as she spoke, as if in search of suffrages; 
but no one seemed able or willing to come forward as a witness. 

“ People form opinions on such slight grounds at Fingall,” ob- 
served her ladyship, carelessly. “ Now I myself have heard a most 
extraordinary story, which of course I don’t believe for one mo- 
ment, about a married lady at the water-party the other day, who 
actually induced Mr. Lewis to change the places at one of the tables, 
so that she might have Mr. MacAdam for her neighbor.” 

“ It isn’t true,” began Mrs. Mandeville, hotly, but she grew 
hotter still when she realized what she had just tacitly admitted, 
and the fact that several people were looking at her with amuse- 
ment did not tend to restore her composure. “ I mean,” she added, 
desperately, “ that of course if it had been true I should have 
heard of it.” 

“Ah, well,” said her ladyship, “I shall contradict it on your 
authority. I am so glad I may. But to go back, my dear Mrs. 


184 


THE PRICE OF A PEARL 


Mandeville, to what we were saying. How did you first get wind 
of this strange story about that unfortunate young man ?” 

“Surely it is public property by this time,” urged the younger 
woman, with a change both of tone and manner which proved 
her to have been genuinely disconcerted by her ladyship’s latest 
thrust. 

“ Of course it is public property now, but it was still private 
when you first set it going. You must have heard it on very good 
authority to consider yourself justified?” 

“ It was on good authority,” Mrs. Mandeville admitted, reluc- 
tantly. “ I heard it from a cousin of the man himself.” 

“ Of what man? — the wrong man or the right?” demanded Lady 
Dalrymple, with some asperity. 

“ I mean, of course, the man to whom poor Mrs. MacAdam had 
been married in the first instance.” 

“ Ah, now I begin to understand ! And what may his name 
have been, if it is not an indiscreet question ?” 

“Well, I suppose there is no harm in mentioning it. Captain 
Lonsdale did not swear me to secrecy.” 

“Lonsdale! You surely don’t mean the man who was court- 
martialed the other day for being tipsy on parade? I didn’t know 
that he was received in polite society.” 

“ My dear Lady Dalrymple, like you, I belteve nothing that I 
hear at Fingall, and very little of what I see. At all events, I have 
not the slightest idea of giving up an old friend because a few ill- 
natured people choose to believe the worst of him.” 

“ Quite right,” nodded her ladyship. “ Charity covers the multi- 
tude of sins. We have all been taught that, haven’t we? Then 
Lonsdale was the name of Mrs. Mac Adam’s first husband — is that it?” 

“Yes,” assented Mrs. Mandeville, with sulky brevity. 

“ And did your friend tell you that his cousin was a brute — for 
that is what you told us just now ?” 

“ He implied it. He said she was greatly to be pitied, but that 
it was unfortunate that her husband had not died a few weeks be- 
fore he did, as it would make all the difference to this young man, 
and then of course I understood that — ” 

“Yes, yes. We all understand that. Did he tell you anything 
else ?” 

“ I forget what else he may have said. Of course, Mr. MacAdam 
married her as soon as possible after that ; and the esclandre didn’t 
apparently prevent him from getting on very well out in India.” 


OVER TTIE TEACUPS 


185 


“But one sees now why he refused the baronetcy,” observed 
her ladyship, musingly. 

As this was news to most of those present, she was immediately 
pressed for an explanation, in the midst of which she perceived 
that Pearl had come in from the back drawing-room, and was 
listening with an air of impassible coldness that robbed her face 
of all its youthful contours. 

“ At this rate,” thought the old lady, impatiently, “ she will 
look passee directly. I must get him out of her head before three 
months are over.” 

Mrs. Mandeville’s voice broke in on this reflection. 

“ If Mr. MacAdam’s father had not inherited Adamscourt, of 
course the truth need never have come out at all.” 

“ But apparently you thought it ought to come out directly,” re- 
torted Lady Dalrymple, rather shrewishly. 

“ Oh, well, I had my reasons. It seemed to me that he was 
in a false position here, for every one looked upon him as the heir 
to Adamscourt.” This with a glance at Pearl, designed to put her 
out of countenance. 

“ You will excuse me, I am sure, for asking the question,” said 
Pearl’s godmother, “but was Captain Lonsdale quite — Well, I 
needn’t be explicit. Your little dinners, I have always heard, are 
so recherche , and the wine beyond reproach.” 

Mrs. Mandeville hastily rose, and declared she must be going. 

« You’re very severe on the poor man,” she said, reproachfully, 
as she held out her hand, “ and on me too by implication.” 

“ Not at all, my dear, but I wish Mr. Mandeville would send for 
you. You want some one to look after you, you do indeed, and I 
don’t think that Captain Lonsdale is at all the proper person.” 

Mrs. Mandeville’s countenance as she took her leave was scarcely 
so elated as when she had made her entree. In this war of words 
over the tea-cups she had come off second-best, and her rage could 
hardly be dissembled. And yet? Was she so very much worse, 
after all, than those who joined in condemning her the moment 
that her back was turned ? 

Pearl did not think so, little cause as she had to love the woman 
who would so gladly have spoiled her happiness. 

Was she indeed so much better herself that she could afford to 
despise her? How many times before to-day had not she also 
joined in conversation no whit less blamable than this! How 
often had she not discussed the lives of others, their secret sins 


186 


THE PRICE OF A PEARL 


and their bitter sorrows, with precisely the same shallowness and 
levity, which, because it now concerned herself nearly, she found 
so heart-breaking to-day ! 

Poor Pearl ! if it was a salutary lesson that she was learning 
now, it was also a most humbling one, and the price she was called 
on to pay for it was that of her very heart’s blood. 


CHAPTER XII 


SET FREE 

“ There come to most women moments when to be cruel is their only refuge 
against themselves and others.” 

“ That is well over !” said Lady Dalrymple, breathing an audi- 
ble sigh of relief, as the last of her guests bade her good-bye. 
“ And now, Pearl, come here, child, and sit down. It is time 
that we should arrive at some understanding.” 

“About what?” asked Pearl, coldly, sitting down as requested, 
or rather dropping into her accustomed low seat in the window 
with a gesture that revealed mental disgust no less than physical 
weariness. 

“ About your future, my dear, which does not look particularly 
brilliant at present. You are aware, I suppose, that you have man- 
aged to slip between two stools?” 

“ I have no doubt that is what people are good enough to say 
about me,” replied Pearl, with a kind of haughty languor both of 
tone and of manner which was certainly not likely to conciliate her 
godmother’s already ruffled feelings. 

“ Naturally they say so — I say so myself. Pearl, what a born 
fool you were to refuse Mr. Lewis !” 

“ I thought we had discussed that question already. I can’t see 
the use of going over the ground again.” 

“Yes, my dear, you were a fool, and the worst of it is that no 
one can be induced to believe in such folly. The general idea at 
Fingall is that you have not been given the chance of refusing 
him.” 

Pearl was silent. She could not deny the truth of what Lady 
Dalrymple had just said. From the worldly point of view, there 
was no doubt that she had managed to make a hash of her life. 

Seeing that she had scored a point, her godmother went on with 
merciless candor. 

“ It was a blessing that you did not go in for a second edition 


188 


THE PRICE OF A PEARL 


of Sunday’s headache, but still, my dear, I cannot say much for 
your looks to-day. People like you were never meant to indulge 
in the luxury of strong sentiments.” 

“ So you have always told me.” 

“ And I was right. It is a mistake at all times, but some women 
manage to get over the business better than others. You appar- 
ently are going to let it get the better of you !” 

“ I don’t know what you mean.” And Pearl’s eyes looked, it 
must be confessed, the very reverse of seraphic at that moment. 

Lady Dalrymple smiled rather sardonically. She was proud at 
having at last succeeded in finding a weak spot in the girl’s armor, 
and went on to rub salt into the wound which she had just in- 
flicted. 

“ You are going to cry for the moon,” she observed, scornfully, 
“ like any other silly miss in her teens, who imagines that a hus- 
band is another name for a Romeo under the window. Bah ! 
Pearl, when I think that this day week you had Mr. Lewis at your 
feet, and that to-day you are sitting at mine, looking like a ghost, 
because that unfortunate boy can’t marry you, I feel inclined to 
wash my hands of you altogether.” 

“ I am perfectly aware,” said Pearl, with a quietness that was 
rather misleading, “ that I am no credit to you, Aunt Cecilia.” 

Her godmother, used all her life to bullying every one with 
whom she had to do — Pearl herself only excepted — was altogether 
lacking in that fine perception which would have enabled a far less 
clever woman to discern that the girl was in no mood to be goaded. 

“ No credit indeed !” she retorted, fiercely, in answer to what she 
mistook for a sort of half-apology. “ I thought you would have 
disgraced me to-day, with your pinched lips and heavy eyelids. 
No wonder that Mrs. Mandeville fancied herself at liberty to insult 
you.” 

“ If you really mean what you say, Aunt Cecilia, I think it would 
be best for us to be independent of each other for the future.” 

The girl had risen from her low seat, and now stood confronting 
her godmother, with an expression of cold fury, before which the 
old lady literally shrank back as from a sudden blow. 

“ What !” she exclaimed, breathlessly. “ You dare to propose 
that ? — you!” 

“ Certainly. If you dare so much as to hint that I disgrace you, 
it is high time that we part.” 

“ Part 1” repeated Lady Dalrymple, with a shrill laugh that had 


SET FREE 


189 


in it more of dismay than of triumph. “ With the breadth of the 
square between us ! Are you mad, child? How do you suppose 
that will mend matters ?” 

Pearl shrugged her shoulders. Now that her blood was up, and 
her temper fairly roused, she forgot even the externals of that re- 
spect for her godmother’s age and position, in which, to do her 
justice, she had never hitherto neglected her duty. 

“ At least you will not be responsible for me any longer,” she 
said, icily. 

“Pearl, sit down. Be reasonable, for pity’s sake. You are not 
really going to keep your word to that unfortunate boy ?” 

“ That is a question for Mr. MacAdam to put,” answered Pearl, 
with increasing haughtiness of demeanor, as evinced by a stiff 
maintenance of her upright position. 

“ He will not dare to put it. My dear, you are nursing a vain 
hope. How can you marry him now, when he has neither name 
nor fortune to offer you ?” 

“ At least I need not forswear myself, as you propose, by mar- 
rying a man I don’t care for.” 

“ Be reasonable,” urged her ladyship for the second time, and 
in a tone many degrees more conciliatory than the one which she 
had employed at the'outset. 

It was the first time that she had ever come in contact with the 
girl’s real character, having hitherto avoided, by a sort of uncon- 
scious instinct, all occasion for anything like a serious difference. 

Now she was surprised, as tyrants not unseldom are, at the pas- 
sive strength of the will opposed to her own ; and began to per- 
ceive the necessity of altering her tactics. 

“ Be reasonable,” she repeated, uneasily, to which Pearl retorted, 
fiercely : 

“ I have been reasonable all my life at your command, and much 
good it has done me.” 

“ My dear, do you know what you are saying ?” 

“ Yes, I say it advisedly. You have taught me ever since I was 
a baby in arms that I was to keep my feelings in abeyance ; that 
I was to marry for position, for rank, for riches, for anything in the 
whole wide world but love, and the result is that my heart is with- 
ered before it has ever bloomed. I can’t love in the sense that I 
can’t sacrifice myself, but at least I have not fallen so low as to sell 
myself. And so, between the two stools, as you truly say, I have 
come to the ground.” 


190 


THE PRICE OF A PEARL 


She stopped, literally breathless from the long pent-up rush of 
bitter emotion which now for the first time found adequate ex- 
pression. 

Her godmother stared at her in evident bewilderment, but at- 
tempted no defence against the accusation that had been hurled out 
in these strangely unmeasured terms. 

The peculiarity of any powerful feeling is, for the time being at 
least, to revolutionize character. Ice is thawed and fire is quenched 
under its influence. The unreserved by nature place themselves 
under lock and key ; those who have all their lives been reticent 
of their deepest emotions wrench down the bars and fling wide 
the door, letting it be known for once, if for once only, what man- 
ner of men and women they are in very truth. 

Pearl never fully understood by what strange impulse she was 
minded now to lay herself bare to one who had never truly known 
her. 

“You can never despise my folly, Aunt Cecilia, as I despise the 
wisdom you have taught me, and which, unhappily, I can’t unlearn. 
You may be quite easy about me. I haven’t the moral courage to 
fly in the face of the world by keeping my promise. Mr. Mac- 
Adam has been generous enough to give me back my word. And 
I — God help me! I have been ungenerous enough to take it 
back. That is your work, Aunt Cecilia. You may be proud of it. 
What a noble prize I am for any man ! I haven’t even the courage 
to be downright bad and sell myself. I wish I could.” 

Still no word of remonstrance or of self-defence from Lady Dai- 
ry mple. If she felt relief at what she had just heard, there was no 
outward sign of it in her face, which appeared suddenly and strange- 
ly wan in the gray twilight. 

Rather did her half-shrinking figure look as if the woman’s soul 
was being slowly crushed — crushed like the faithless Roman maiden 
beneath the Sabine bucklers, crushed by the fierce self-accusation 
of the girl whom she had trained up after her own purpose. If 
hell means failure, hell had opened now for this worldly hard old 
woman, whose own will had been the law of her life hitherto. It 
was terrible to have to sit there and hear Pearl trampling herself 
under foot, and to know that she — her godmother and natural 
guardian — had prided herself on giving her precisely the educa- 
tion and the principles which had made the girl thus vile and des- 
picable in her own eyes. 

She could not understand the reason of her failure even now, 


SET FREE 


191 


but the fact itself was borne in upon her with a glaring distinct- 
ness that seemed to anticipate the day of judgment ; and the vision 
was one of overwhelming bitterness. 

She put her hands before her eyes to shut it out. Pearl did not 
notice how exceedingly they trembled. She did not stop to meas- 
ure the strength of her own words, or she might possibly have been 
more gentle. But her floodgates were opened now, and the vio- 
lence of her self-contempt bore down all her natural reserve. 

“ I did not choose before to tell you that I had heard from Mr. 
MacAdam, because I felt that I could not face your visitors if you 
knew the truth. It was hard enough as it was, and as it seems 
that, after all, I disgraced you as well as myself, I think we had 
better part.” 

There was a faint disclamatory murmur from the stooping fig- 
ure, but it fell upon deaf ears, and Pearl went on, relentlessly : 

“You will call me ungrateful, I know. I believe I am ungrate- 
ful, blackly ungrateful ; for I wish — yes, I wish with all my heart 
that I had nothing to be grateful for. I wish that you had not 
overwhelmed me all my life with benefits which I can never repay. 
Yes, I am ungrateful, Aunt Cecilia. You can tell all your friends 
that I am, and they will say you are right to wash your hands of me.” 

Again she paused and awaited some crushing retort from Lady 
Dalrymple of the sort she had so often heard addressed to others, 
though to herself never. It did not come to-night, and the silence 
of the darkening rooms began to feel oppressive. 

Pearl waited for a few moments, and then went and stood be- 
side her godmother’s throne-like chair. It takes two to make a 
quarrel, and there was no quarrel here. The wave of excited feel- 
ing was fast subsiding, and already the girl had begun to regret 
some of her unguarded phrases. 

“ I’m going home now,” she said, after a brief pause, in which 
Lady Dalrymple stirred neither hand nor foot. “ I think perhaps 
we have both said things for which we shall be sorry to-morrow. 
I know I shall, and I hope you will, Aunt Cecilia, for you’ve been 
very cruel to me.” 

For a few seconds longer she waited, hearing nothing in the per- 
fect silence except the wild pulsations of her own rebellious heart. 

The room was all but dark now ; she had to grope her way among 
the numerous chairs and lounges till she reached the door. When 
she opened it, a ray of light from the gas-lit corridor fell upon the 
shadowy figure that she had left behind. 


192 


THE PRICE OF A PEARL 


Pearl stood for a moment irresolute. Should she go back and 
take her godmother’s hand and give her, not indeed the kiss of 
tender filial affection, of a gratitude she did not feel, of a reverence 
she could not feign — but — the kiss of peace ? Should she let the 
sun go down upon her wrath, or not? 

Alas! nature was all-powerful in Pearl Merry weather at this 
period of her existence, and the light that was in her was little 
better than darkness. Her proud spirit revolted at the thought of 
taking the first step. “ She said I had disgraced her,” thought the 
girl, with reviving indignation. “ It is for her to make the apology 
to me. I have spoken no more than the truth.” 

Noiselessly she closed the door as she had opened it, and went 
down-stairs, not guessing that a chapter of her life was closed for 
evermore, that she was set free from henceforth to pass her days 
as she pleased, none saying nay to her or seeking to mould her 
circumstances. 

One hour later she was summoned back, and stood once more 
beside her godmother, not the imperious, self-willed, handsome old 
lady known to Fingall, but a poor palsied wreck of humanity, her 
false tresses fallen aside from the wrinkled brow, and disclosing 
to view what looked in the searching lamplight horribly like a 
death’s-head with its dreadful hollows and grinning teeth. 

Not dead, nor likely to die. Strong enough to live for years, 
perhaps, if such mindless existence could be called life. Soul 
asleep, reason departed ; nothing left save that body to whose de- 
parting beauty she had clung so desperately as to render it at last 
a mere mass of living unreality. And, by a strange irony of fate, 
the last coherent words that her goddaughter ever heard from her 
were those which had been as it were that keynote of her life on 
which she had so greatly plumed herself : “ Be reasonable.” 

They haunted poor Pearl for many a long week and month after- 
wards, on account of their hideous mockery. 


CHAPTER XIII 


FOR THE SAKE OF A WOMAN 

“In twilight and in fearfulness 
We feel our path along 
From heart to heart, yet none the less 
Our way is often wrong.” 

“ I say, Merry weather, have you heard the news ? The gov- 
ernor is going out next month to Australia.” 

In company with one or two of his fellow-clerks, Stephen was 
waiting outside the great stone building in Lombard Street known 
to the financial and commercial world as “ Lewis & Ormethwaite.” 

It wanted about a minute still of the hateful and hated stroke 
of the clock which gave the signal for the heavy iron door to roll 
back slowly on its stiff hinges with that peculiar grating sound so 
painfully suggestive to Pearl’s lazy brother of prison gates and of 
the treadmill supposed to be a part of prison discipline. 

The news imparted to him by his desk-fellow failed to rouse him 
from his air of habitual ennui. 

“ Which governor ?” he asked, listlessly. “ Strikes me there 
are two of ’em, ain’t there ?” 

“ Pooh ! only one that counts. Every one knows that old Lewis 
runs this show. The other fellow is only what they call a sleep- 
ing partner.” 

“ That’s a post would suit me down to the ground. I know I 
wish I was in his shoes, that’s all,” and Stephen glanced solici- 
tously at his own irreproachable patent - leathers, as though he 
scarcely found them very easy wearing. To be sure, they were 
not paid for, but for the matter of that neither was any other arti- 
cle of clothing upon his well-groomed person at that moment. 

Something in the unconscious gesture tickled his companion, 
who burst into a fit of good-humored laughter. 

“ How did you manage to get round old Lewis in the first in- 
stance ? That’s what we all want to know. He isn’t partial, as a 
general rule, to heavy swells like yourself.” 

13 


194 


THE PRICE OF A PEARL 


“ Oh, I had very little to do with it, you bet. What’s he going 
to the Antipodes for ?” 

“ To look after the business, of course. They have a big house 
in Melbourne, and he generally goes out to overhaul matters every 
three years or so.” 

“ I don’t see what good it will do us, ’’observed Stephen, discon- 
tentedly. “ The grind here will go on just the same.” 

“ Yes, my dear fellow, of course it will, but you see he generally 
takes out one of us juniors with him, and that means a rise.” 

“ Dearly bought, I should say, if one has to be tied to his apron- 
strings the whole time. What a stick the fellow is, to be sure !” 

“ A straight one, though,” said the first speaker, decisively. 
“ One is always sure of justice from old Lewis.” 

But further discussion of the “governor’s” character was here 
cut short by the opening of the bank door. 

Swiftly and silently every member of the establishment slipped 
into his appointed place, the stately cat, who was nearly as much 
respected on the premises as Mr. Lewis himself, stalked off with 
majestic feline dignity to his own quarters, and the work of the 
day began. 

To Stephen Merryweather it seemed more than usually irksome. 
Certain odious figures and calculations in no way connected with 
the ledger on his desk kept obtruding themselves upon his con- 
sciousness, and imperatively demanded settlement. 

For two or three days past his correspondence had been of a 
most unpleasant nature. Reminders — and by no means gentle 
ones — of long - standing accounts with his Fingall creditors; 
lengthy bills of more recent date from London tradesmen begin- 
ning to be anxious about their money ; pressing claims for the 
payment of usurious interest from those human sharks at Oxford 
and elsewhere who make the downward path so smooth and the 
upward one so difficult to the unfortunate youths once entangled 
in their clutches — these were the sort of letters that Stephen was 
apt to receive at quarter-day, and it must be admitted that they 
were scarcely agreeable reading. 

Moreover, he had heard from Mrs. Mandeville that very morning, 
and she had given him a commission that implied the disburse- 
ment of ready money, of which he had scarcely a penny to bless 
himself with. And, as experience had long since taught him, Mrs. 
Mandeville had a happy knack of forgetting her small debts. 

Finally, as if to add the overflowing drop to his cup of personal 


FOR THE SAKE OF A WOMAN 


195 


annoyances, she had written a hasty postscript of that most pro- 
voking kind which implies some previous knowledge on the part 
of the person addressed. 

“ Of course you have heard,” she wrote, “ of this extraordinary 
business about young MacAdam ? We can talk of nothing else 
here, and they say Lady Dairy mple is furious.” 

“ I suppose he and Pearl must be engaged,” surmised Stephen ; 
“ but, if so, why is the old girl furious ?” 

He had put his hand in his pocket, and was just about to re- 
peruse the puzzling paragraph, when Mr. Lewis passed up the 
matted corridor, his eyes staring, or rather blinking as usual into 
vacancy, but none the less perfectly cognizant of all that was 
going on around them. 

Woe betide the foolish individual who ever attempted to take 
advantage of the “ Bat’s ” defective vision ! He was sure, sooner 
or later, to be summoned to the banker’s private sanctum, there 
to receive one of those dry warnings which, from such lips as his, 
are tantamount to a sharp reproof. 

When such a summons was sent to Stephen in the course of 
the forenoon, he began to quake with guilty apprehension lest 
any of his scamped work had passed under the searching glance 
of his unbending chief. 

But no ! In so far as it was possible for Mr. Lewis’s counte- 
nance to relax in office hours, it was relaxed to-day at sight of 
Pearl’s brother. There was even a. ghost of a smile hovering 
about his compressed lips as he nodded a greeting to young Mer- 
ryweather, and bade him sit down for a few moments while he 
finished his letters. Infinitely relieved, Stephen obeyed, and 
looked on in idle curiosity while the banker’s pen flew rapidty 
across his paper. To him it was a matter for endless astonish- 
ment that any one should do a stroke of work who had the means 
of living in idleness. And that a rich man should slave as Lewis 
did at making money which, apparently, he did not care to spend, 
seemed to this hopeful youth nothing short of rank idiocy. 

Mr. Lewis’s dry, level voice broke in on these rather uncompli- 
mentary reflections. 

“ Ahem ! I sent for you, Merry weather, to speak to you about 
your own future. You may have heard, perhaps, that I am going 
out shortly to Australia ?” 

Stephen admitted that he had heard a rumor to that effect. 

“ It is my custom, on these occasions, to take one of the junior 


196 


THE PRICE OF A PEARL 


clerks with me. I consider it a good opportunity for a young 
fellow who wishes to get on in the world, as I presume you do ?” 

A pause, in which he watched the young man rather narrowly, 
as if to gauge the effect of these last words. Stephen’s face was 
not expressive of ecstasy, and Mr. Lewis’s tone sharpened per- 
ceptibly as he went on. 

“ You understand, of course, that if I offer the berth to you 
there is no question of merit in the matter ?” 

“Of course I understand that, sir,” Stephen answered, awk- 
wardly. 

“Your father, I take it, would have no objection to your going?” 

“ Perhaps I had better write to him, sir,” and Stephen’s manner 
became momently more embarrassed. 

“ Have you any objection yourself ?” said Lewis, incisively, 
bringing his lenses to bear, as he spoke, on Stephen’s telltale 
countenance. 

“ I ? Oh, of course not, sir. I am only taken by surprise. I 
have been here such a short time, and — ” 

“Not long enough to entitle you to the privilege, certainly,” 
interrupted Lewis, “ but I promised your sister to do what I could 
for you. You had better take counsel with her, and let me know 
your decision next Monday. That will give you time to hear 
from her.” 

“ Yes, sir,” said Stephen, with an inward anathema on Pearl’s 
interference. 

“Very well. You can go now. No — by-the-way, there was 
something else I wanted to ask you. Have you seen this ?” 

“ This ” proved to be a paragraph in the Times , announcing the 
sudden death of Mr. Hector MacAdam, of Adamscourt, late Com- 
missioner of Hattarabad. After a brief resume of the deceased 
gentleman’s official career, it wound up with these significant 
words: “In the absence of direct male heirs, we understand that 
the estates of Adamscourt pass to a distant member of the family, 
whose actual whereabouts has not yet been ascertained.” 

Stephen looked up in evident wonder. 

“ I am as surprised as you are yourself, sir,” he said, unobserv- 
ant, apparently, of the fact that Mr. Lewis had expressed no sur- 
prise at all. 

“ Have you any idea as to whether the young fellow was aware 
of the state of things ?” he asked, quietly. 

“ Oh no, sir, I’m certain he knew nothing.” And even as he 


FOR THE SAKE OF A WOMAN 


197 


spoke Stephen remembered Mrs. Mandeville’s mysterious post- 
script. It was quite plain now why Lady Dalrymple was furious. 

“ You were acquainted with young MacAdam, I believe, at Ox- 
ford ?” 

“ Yes, sir — to a certain extent.” 

Stephen spoke with some hesitation. He was not quite sure 
how far it would be politic to claiiji anything like intimacy with a 
nameless youth, however estimable. 

“ Not in the same set, eh ?” and again a shadowy smile played 
round the corners of Bartholomew’s inflexible mouth. 

It made Stephen feel uncomfortable, for it seemed to hint at a 
more accurate knowledge of his college pranks and sporting pro- 
clivities than might at first sight have been ascribed to one so far 
removed from the young man’s sphere of existence. 

“ He was not of the same college,” Stephen answered, evasively. 
“ He held a scholarship at Balliol.” 

“ Oh, really ? Then I suppose he is a clever fellow ?” 

“ I suppose he must be. He certainly worked hard enough.” 

“ What was he doing at Fingall ?” 

“ Studying medicine, I believe, sir, or natural science, or some- 
thing of that sort.” 

Lewis lifted his eyebrows, and looked for the first time a trifle 
surprised. 

“ Indeed ! is that so ?” he said, thoughtfully, and drummed his 
fingers on the table with a curious disconcerted expression that 
Stephen was at a loss to comprehend. Would it have pleased him 
better to hear that young MacAdam had been less worthily em- 
ployed at Fingall ? “ Humph ! Well, you can go now, Merry- 

weather. I shall expect your answer on Monday.” 

With an incoherent murmur of thanks Stephen departed, and as 
the door closed behind him Mr. Lewis called to mind his uncle’s 
shrewd warning, and murmured, thoughtfully : 

“ The old fellow was right. I did forswear my principles for 
the sake of a woman.” 

Was it also for the sake of a woman that he next proceeded — 
with an air of half-guilty embarrassment — to begin writing the 
following letter : 

“ Dear Mr. MacAdam, — I have seen the announcement of your 
father’s death in the papers, and understand, perhaps more fully 
than most of those who may read it, what such a loss must imply 


198 


THE PRICE OF A PEARL 


to his son. My only excuse for writing you at all lies in the fact 
that your mother was my — ” 

He had written thus far, and was about to blot his page and 
turn it, when the door opened, and Lord Herbert Meredith was 
announced. 

In the twinkling of an eye the banker had recovered all his offi- 
cial composure. He received his visitor with his usual grave 
courtesy, and assumed a characteristic attitude of polite attention. 

“ My business is private,” began Bertie, rather nervously, cross- 
ing his long legs with a gesture that betokened him to be ill at 
ease, mentally if not physically. 

“ We shall not be disturbed,” said Lewis, quietly. “ What can 
I do for you, Lord Herbert ?” 

“You asked me the other day — at Fingall — some questions 
about a friend of mine — MacAdam. May I in my turn ask you 
one or two to-day about his family ?” 

Mr. Lewis inclined his head gravely. 

“ I don’t know if you are aware of what has happened since we 
last met ?” and Bertie glanced inquiringly at the Times , which lay 
at his elbow on the writing-table. 

“ I see that your friend has had the misfortune to lose his 
father.” 

“ If that were all !” exclaimed Bertie, impulsively. 

“ Unfortunately,” replied the other, rather meaningly, “ every 
one must know now that that is not all.” 

“ Every one does know as much as that, but as far as I can 
make out, Mr. Lewis, no one seems to know much more than that, 
and, as I need hardly tell you, bare facts are very cruel things.” 

“ Mercilessly cruel,” Lewis answered, in a low tone of concen- 
trated bitterness that caused his visitor to glance at him with some 
surprise. 

“ That being so,” he said, presently, “ you can understand per- 
haps why I am here to-day. I have an impression, Mr. Lewis, that 
you know more of the rights and the wrongs of this unhappy busi- 
ness than any one else.” 

Some curious instinct prompted Bertie to look away from Mr. 
Lewis as he spoke, and during the slight pause that followed he 
kept his eyes steadily averted. Yet, so abnormally sensitive was 
he to the condition of the moral atmosphere about him, he knew 
without seeing that the man who sat opposite to him was strange- 


FOR THE SAKE OF A WOMAN 


199 


ly disturbed, that underneath the rigid exterior raged a storm of 
conflicting emotions which found at last some partial vent in the 
stammering answer. 

“ Are you — are you here as an envoy for your friend, Lord Her- 
bert ?” 

“ Certainly not. He does not know of my coming.” 

“ Am I to understand that his father left him in total ignorance 
of his real position ?” 

“ He did ; but you must remember that till within the last four 
years there was no necessity to tell the truth. If it hadn’t been a 
question of inheriting Adamscourt, no complication would have 
arisen.” 

“ You forget Mrs. Mandeville, and people of her stamp,” said 
Mr. Lewis, coldly. 

Bertie shrugged his shoulders. 

“ Unfortunately for MacAdam, he passed at Fingall for being 
the heir to Adamscourt. In a less exalted position people would 
have been less free, I fancy, with his name.” 

“ Possibly, but his father did him a cruel wrong by keeping 
silence. I grant you the secret was not widely known, Lord Her- 
bert ; but it was known to a few, and that means sooner or later it 
must be known to many.” 

“ All that MacAdam himself knows as yet is the brutal fact that 
his father and mother were not married when he was born.” 

“ It was impossible for them to be married at that time. Mrs. 
MacAdam’s first husband was alive, and divorce was not the law 
of the land for some years later.” 

“ I think I understood you to say the other day that you didn’t 
know her.” 

“ I refused to know her.” 

The words themselves were harsh, but they were not harshly 
spoken. Rather was there in the utterance a sad ring of despond- 
ency, as though in making this admission the man were also pass- 
ing judgment on himself. 

“ I had hoped,” said Bertie, with a little painful hesitation — “in 
fact, I heard — that she was more sinned against than sinning.” 

“ I have heard the same. But, as you said just now, Lord Her- 
bert, bare facts are cruel things, and it was on the facts of the 
case that I judged her.” 

“ May I be allowed to know the facts, Mr. Lewis?” 

“ You can guess them, I think, without much difficulty. She 


200 


THE PRICE OF A PEARL 


was persuaded to leave her husband by the father of your friend, 
and went abroad with him as his wife, but she was not his wife for 
more than a year later.” 

Silence for some moments, in which Bertie mentally reviewed 
all that had ever been made known to him of his friend’s history. 
How clearly he could understand now all that had once seemed in- 
explicable — the strained relations between father and son, born of 
remorse on the one side, of ignorance on the other ; the natural 
clinging of the boy to the mother who understood him, his equally 
natural reserve and shyness with the father to whom his very ex- 
istence seemed an offence and was a living reproach ; the open pref- 
erence of the latter for the younger brother who, but for his un- 
timely death, would have been the rightful heir to Adamscourt ; 
the moody disappointment at his loss which had so poisoned poor 
Hector’s home life ; the spasmodic natural affection which had 
struggled in vain with an ever-deepening estrangement — all was 
now comprehensible in the light of this tragical story, if indeed it 
was not excusable and pardonable. 

But, for anything like balm or consolation to his friend in what 
he had just heard, Bertie knew that he might look in vain. The 
facts of the case were too merciless. Hector’s mother had taught 
him to fear God and to reverence woman, yet it was none the less 
true that she herself had sinned the sin for which in this life there 
is no forgiveness. 

“ There is nothing more that you can tell me ?” he said at last, 
rousing himself with one of his spasmodic jerks from this mourn- 
ful reverie. 

“ There is something more to be said,” Lewis answered, in a 
voice that scarcely rose above a whisper. 

His face was ashy pale with emotion, and his lips were trem- 
bling. Bertie looked at him in undisguised astonishment mingled 
with the deepest compassion. 

“ I am aware — I recognize that your friend has a claim on me, 
and I — ” 

Mr. Lewis had got thus far, when the other put out an impulsive 
hand as if to stop him. 

“Pray don’t say any more,” exclaimed Bertie, hastily. “That 
is the last claim that MacAdam would wish you to recognize, I am 
certain.” 

It would have been better for his friend, as he knew later, if bn 
this occasion he had suffered Mr. Lewis to finish his sentence, and 


FOR THE SAKE OF A WOMAN 


201 


so arrived himself at understanding what the other meant to convey. 
As it was, with the best intentions in the world, beguiled by that 
feminine quickness of intuition which had always made him so 
unlike his fellows, poor Bertie overreached himself, and jumped 
to a hopelessly wrong conclusion. 

Aware as he was of the man’s feeling for Pearl Merryweather, 
he connected with her the evident emotion under which Mr. Lewis 
was now laboring, and never guessed that the claim of which he 
spoke was of far older date, grounded on remorse rather than ro- 
mance, and admitted on principle rather than on sentiment. The 
sudden stiffening of the banker’s tone and manner did not 'un- 
fortunately help to clear up this disastrous misunderstanding of 
his real meaning on the part of Bertie Meredith. 

“ There is no other claim to be recognized,” Lewis answered, 
frigidly. “ If your friend repudiates that, I have of course nothing 
further to say.” 

“Perhaps,” said Bertie, .with a puzzled air, “I have failed to 
express myself properly. What I meant was that very likely 
MacAdam might feel sore — under the circumstances — if you — ” 

“ Under the circumstances,” repeated Lewis, with a suppressed 
bitterness which Bertie fancied he could understand, “ I have per- 
haps as much right to feel sore as he has.” 

“ Yes, of course,” assented Bertie, in some amazement at such 
an admission from so reserved a nature; “but for that very 
reason — ” 

“ I think,” interrupted Lewis, “ that there is nothing to be 
gained, Lord Herbert, by discussing this matter any further. If 
I can be of service to your friend, pray let me know. I shall be 
in England for another fortnight.” 

He rose as he spoke, and Bertie felt himself dismissed. He 
was surprised and dismayed at the turn which things had taken, 
and began a sort of incoherent apology. But it seemed to fall on 
deaf or unheeding ears, and no human being had ever seen Bat 
Lewis look so grim and implacable as he did at that moment in 
the eyes of Hector’s friend. 

“ Of little meddling comes great good,” Bertie reflected, rue- 
fully, when he found himself in the street after having been bowed 
off the premises with official courtesy by the gray-haired manager. 
“ I think I see myself ever asking a favor again in that quarter.” 

Little indeed did he suspect that by his own blunder the man 
from whom he had just parted had been hurt, wounded to the 


202 


THE PRICE OF A PEARL 


very depths of a morbidly sensitive nature. Never once did lie 
guess that the soreness hinted at in those few bitter words which 
had fallen from Lewis was connected with the dead, not with the 
living, and that Blanche Armytage, not Pearl Merryweather, was 
in his thoughts when, with trembling lips and halting tongue, he 
had stammered out his recognition of Hector’s claim upon him. 


CHAPTER XIV 


MISSING ! 

“ In the natural Desert of rocks and sand, or in the populous moral Desert of 
selfishness and baseness — to such Temptation are we all called.” 

It was the fifth day of unfamiliar liberty for Pearl Merry- 
weather, and already it had begun to weigh on her more heavily 
than any previous bondage. She was practically alone in the 
great city, although Lady Dairy m pie’s door was besieged daily by 
polite inquiries from those so-called friends who had never failed 
to do justice to her good dinners, and no doubt regretted now 
with more or less sincerity the prospect of their coming to an end. 
But if, in the days of her prosperity, Pearl had found but little 
satisfaction in her godmother’s “ world,” it was not likely that she 
would turn in her adversity to such cold comfort as it could offer her. 

She denied herself persistently to all visitors, Mrs. Mandeville 
among the number, on the plea that she could not be spared from 
the sick-room. But from herself she could not hide the bitter fact 
that her presence there was scarcely soothing. It seemed, indeed, 
as if that last painful scene between herself and Lady Dalrymple 
was to be stereotyped forever on the old woman’s paralyzed brain 
and arrested memory, for she plainly dreaded the very sight of her 
once favored goddaughter, although her roving eyes and meaning- 
less words betrayed the flight of reason. 

Doctors and nurses were agreed at last that Pearl had better 
keep away, and with a heavy heart she consented to the justice of 
this verdict. 

Thrown thus on her own resources, she was amazed to find how 
little these were likely in the future to fill up her empty days. In 
the busy idleness of her old life, in its round of fashionable pleas- 
ure and empty gayeties and unwholesome excitements, she had 
never suspected the nakedness of her own land, nor guessed that 
the main buttress of her various accomplishments was after all 
only vanity. 


204 


THE PRICE OF A PEARL 


She looked on far ahead of the present, as the young are wont 
to do, when some startling change of circumstance has revolution- 
ized their lives, and tried to realize the nature of that difference 
which Lady Dalrymple’s continued illness must bring about in her 
social position. 

It was one thing to be Dr. Merry weather’s daughter ; it was an- 
other to be the spoiled darling, the reputed heiress of the wealth- 
iest woman in Fingall. Pearl was shrewd enough to know this, and 
she was aware too that she had many secret enemies, and very 
few, if any, real friends. 

What place would there be for her, either at home or abroad, if 
her godmother’s living death were protracted, as it well might be, 
and all her vast fortune thrown into chancery, or handed over by 
impartial justice to be administered by her husband’s relatives? 
These, as Pearl well knew, had always hated the very name of 
Merry weather. 

She blamed herself for these sordid speculations, but could not 
altogether banish them from her mind. Too long she had been of 
the world as well as in it to have escaped defilement from its con- 
tact, and, though she had been unwilling to sell herself for riches, 
she was by no means prepared for the withdrawal of those count- 
less luxuries with which she had hitherto been surrounded. 

And meanwhile her father, absorbed as ever in his ecclesiastical 
labors, took no heed of this sudden darkening of the girl’s entire 
existence. So long indeed had she been outside the sphere of 
his life that he was, if anything, almost disturbed and perplexed 
by her presence in the house at hours when custom had led him to 
expect her absence. 

“Why are you not with your Aunt Cecilia, my dear?” he would 
ask, vaguely, when she sat down with him to luncheon, a meal 
which, up to the present time, he had either foregone altogeth- 
er, or snatched in solitary haste with a book before him on the 
table. 

And when the matter was explained to him, his comment was 
invariably the same. 

“ Poor thing, poor thing ! It is really very unfortunate, my dear, 
but no doubt she will be better to-morrow. You must let me know 
if she would like me to read with her.” 

Of Hector he never spoke at all, and he seemed to have for- 
gotten the very existence of Mr. Lewis. Not from her father, 
therefore, could Pearl look for either help or sympathy in this 


MISSING ! 


205 


sudden sharp crisis, of which the bitterest element was self-re- 
proach, persistent if also futile. 

All other trials would have been light compared with that sting- 
ing sense of failure, that damning conviction that she had wronged 
her young lover, and robbed him of something more precious than 
the love that she took back. 

She had been prudent ; yes, but there are times when prudence 
is almost cowardice, and looks like treachery. If from henceforth 
Hector rated all women cheaply, she knew that the fault would lie 
at her door. 

Something of all this Mrs. Fursden divined, for affection had 
long given her the key to Pearl’s complex nature. It was not 
easy, however, to offer her sympathy in the face of the obstinate 
silence which the girl maintained with regard to. both her lovers. 
All that Mrs. Fursden could be sure of was that she had accepted 
neither, yet could not acquit herself of having treated each of them 
unfairly. 

Still, being ignorant of the facts of the case, Mrs. Fursden with- 
held her judgment, and Pearl knew that there was more of com- 
passion than of condemnation in the soft brown eyes that used to 
dwell so long and tenderly on hers. 

“ Ah, Aunt Emily !” she exclaimed, impulsively, at the close of 
a visit, in which Mrs. Fursden’s caressing touch seemed to carry 
with it some strange healing power, “ I might have been so differ- 
ent if I had always lived with you.” 

“ Child,” said the old lady, very earnestly, “ don’t talk of what 
might have been. That belongs to my years, not to yours. You 
may be very different from henceforth, and please God you will be.” 

Pearl shook her head with a bitter smile. 

“ You forget my bringing up, Aunt Emily. My baptismal vows 
were read backward for me. I was never taught to renounce 
the world. I was taught to worship its opinion. You know I 
was.” 

“ I do know it, but, my dear child, from the moment that you 
knew it, you were responsible for breaking with your past and be- 
ginning a new life. You are responsible, Pearl, and the matter 
lies in your own hands now.” 

Pearl’s lips trembled, and she moved over to the open window 
that overlooked the dusty little pleasure-ground where for one 
brief half-hour she and Hector had walked as happy lovers, for- 
getful of all else in the world except each other. Where was now 


206 


THE PRICE OF A PEARL 


the fair vision of love that they had looked upon together that de- 
licious afternoon ? Blotted out forever, not by the old wrong done 
before his birth, but by her own miserable weakness, her bondage 
to the world’s opinion, her dread of its censure. She waited for a 
few minutes, swallowing down with a fierce effort the scalding 
tears that had sprung to her eyes, and then said, quietly : 

“I must go now, Aunt Emily. The horses will be getting im- 
patient.” 

“You are not angry with me, Pearl, for my plain speaking?” 

“Angry, with you ? You are the only real friend I have in the 
world and Pearl’s kiss was unusually tender as she bade her 
aunt good-bye. 

Mrs. Fursden detained her for one moment, and looked at her 
very wistfully. 

“ I am not your godmother, Pearl, but sometimes I almost feel 
as if I had promised for you that you will be a good and noble 
woman some day. I know you have it in you. You were meant 
for better things than you have ever yet dreamed of.” 

Pearl answered nothing, only kissed her once more with a rare 
gentleness before she went away. She was shaken to the very 
depths of her being, but her lips were still sealed, and she could 
not bring herself to find words for her struggling emotions. Only 
her glistening eyes spoke for her, and conveyed the gratitude 
she was afraid to utter. For the first time in her life the girl 
tasted the “strange delight” of lowliness when she went out that 
afternoon, humbled and softened, from her aunt’s presence. But 
there were lower depths of personal humiliation awaiting her 
than any to which she had yet descended. She had known secret 
shame, but at anything like public disgrace touching her or hers 
she had never even dimly guessed. Alas ! the time had come 
when this, the sorest of all trials, was to be borne by poor Pearl 
Merryweather. 

She dined alone that evening, her father having gone out, as he 
often did, to attend an important clerical meeting. After dinner, 
as she was wandering about the tiny strip of garden behind the 
house, the old butler came in search of her, and informed her, 
with an air of some mystery, that a gentleman was in the drawing- 
room who wished to speak with her. 

“ Did he give no name ?” asked Pearl, with a sudden wild quick- 
ening of her pulses that almost took her breath away. 

“ No, miss, but I have seen him once before. He came here 


MISSING ! 207 

one morning in the spring, and the master sent him up into the 
drawing-room.” 

The turbulent beating of her heart was stilled in a moment. 
She remembered well enough that morning visit from Mr. Lewis, 
and the abruptness of his departure. Was he coming now to say 
the thing he had left unsaid then, and which she had then longed 
to hear, not from any wholesome interest in his life story, but 
because she was vain of her own empire over the life itself ? She 
did not feel vain to-night when she wefit up-stairs to meet the 
man who had poured out his heart’s best treasures at her feet, 
lie had no cause, as she knew well, to bless the day in which he 
had first seen her. 

He came forward in the shadowy twilight to meet her, and 
looked at her for a moment with strangely searching eyes. Then, 
without a word of conventional greeting, he said, gravely : 

“ Miss Merry weather, where is your brother ?” 

“ What do you mean ?” she faltered, and her very heart stood 
still with terror. 

“ He has been missing since yesterday morning. They know 
nothing of him at his lodgings. If you know anything, I beseech 
of you not to distrust me. I am here as your friend, not as his 
accuser.” 

“ Has he — has he — is it — at the bank ?” 

Pearl’s trembling lips refused to frame a coherent sentence, but 
he understood at once what she would say, and hastened to reas- 
sure her. 

“ It has nothing to do with the bank. My poor child, don’t 
torture yourself on that score. But he has got into some trouble, 
and unhappily he has put himself hopelessly in the wrong by going 
away.” 

“ What sort of trouble ?” she asked him, in a frightened whisper. 

Although he could barely see the outline of her face in the dim, 
uncertain light, he knew that she was cold as well as white with 
misery. 

“It maybe explained,” he answered, soothingly, “but he ought 
not to have gone away. I shall be hard put to it to explain his 
absence for the last two days, and if he doesn’t come back—” 

“ What will happen if he doesn’t come back ?” 

Mr. Lewis hesitated painfully for a Jew torturing moments. 
They aged poor Pearl by as many years ; so at least it seemed to 
her. 


208 


THE PRICE OF A PEARL 


“ I had better tell you exactly what happened,” he said, at last, 
“ and then you can form your own conclusions. Last Friday 1 
sent for your brother, and offered to take him out with me next 
month to Australia. You can guess why I did that, Miss Merry- 
weather ?” 

She bowed her head in silence, and he went on. 

“ Your brother showed no particular alacrity in accepting my 
offer, and I saw that it was rather distasteful to him than other- 
wise. Still, I thought it might be to his advantage to leave his 
old surroundings, and I advised him to consult with you and let 
me have his final answer on Monday. All this is news to you ? 
Did he never write to your father ?” 

“ Not a line to either of us.” 

“ I feared as much. On Monday I sent for him, but, to my 
surprise, I heard he was not at his desk, and he had sent no mes- 
sage to explain his absence. That was an unheard-of breach of 
discipline in my house, Miss Merry weather ; but for once in my 
life I determined to overlook it — publicly, that is. Privately, of 
course, I felt I must speak very plainly to your brother, and after 
office hours I went round to his lodgings.” 

“ Go on, please,” she whispered, seeing that he paused again, as 
if his task were becoming momently more intolerable. 

“ He was not there. On Sunday morning, during church-time, 
he had gone away, nominally for one night, and he was expected 
home at the hour that I called on him. That amazed me a good 
deal, as you may imagine ; so much so that I waited to see him, 
hoping for some explanation of his strange behavior. While I was 
there some one else called and asked for him — a man who, as far 
as I could make out, had already called on Saturday afternoon when 
your brother was out of town. This morning he called at the bank 
and asked for me.” 

Pearl hid her face in her hands, and a low moan broke from her 
lips. 

To the man who watched her both sight and sound were inex- 
pressibly pathetic, lie would have given everything he was worth 
at that moment to have been allowed to lay his hand upon the 
bowed head, and touch the soft, fair hair in tenderest reverence. 

“ I had better go on,” he said, in a low, trembling voice, which 
showed how deeply he was moved, “ for every moment is precious. 
This man who came to me was a jeweller in the City, to whom your 
brother sold some valuable sapphire ornaments about three weeks 


MISSING ! 


209 


ago, just after he came to town. He accounted for his possession 
of them as belonging to his sister, who wished to dispose of them.” 

“ What !” 

Pearl’s exclamation was eloquent of horrified surprise at this 
statement. 

“ Is that untrue f” Lewis asked her, quietly. 

“ It is absolutely untrue. Can Stephen have said anything of 
the kind ? Is there no mistake ? After all, our name is not so very 
uncommon.” 

The tone was piteous in its pleading, but he could not reassure 
her. 

“ I am afraid there is no mistake about the name. Your brother 
undoubtedly sold those ornaments, and received five hundred pounds 
for them. That has been proved. Unhappily, it has also been as- 
serted positively, though it remains yet to be proved, that they 
were not his to sell, and that they belong to Lady Lowick, whose 
son, young Watson, recognized them in the jeweller’s shop last 
Saturday.” 

“ Lady Lowick ! Johnny Watson ! This is absurd. Do they 
want to make out that Stephen has stolen them ?” 

“ Hush !” 

He put out his hand to stop her, for unconsciously she had 
raised her voice far above its usual low pitch. 

“ You must be just, Miss Merry weather. They have laid claim 
to the sapphires, and are prepared to swear to them in court, if the 
jeweller does not give them up ; but this he very naturally declined 
to do until he had seen your brother. And your brother, unfort- 
unately, is not forthcoming. Now you understand why I am here. 
Can you give me the least clew to this unhappy business ? Have 
you any reason to think that your brother was in difficulties — in 
serious difficulties, I mean — of the sort that makes a young fellow 
do something desperate ?” 

“ I don’t understand,” cried Pearl, despairingly. “ Surely they 
don’t mean — they can't mean that Stephen is a thief ?” 

Again he hesitated painfully. The facts of the case were so 
merciless that his one desire throughout had been to put them as 
gently as possible ; but he could not believe that her brother was 
innocent, and he would not say so. 

“ Do you not see,” he asked her, sadly, “ that he has put him- 
self in the wrong by going away ? He has given them the right to 
say what they please.” 

14 


210 


THE PRICE OF A PEARL 


“ Then they are saying something ?” There was an agony of ap- 
prehension in her voice, but he saw that it was for her brother, not 
for herself, and he could not find it in his heart to tell her that her 
own name was implicated through Stephen’s gratuitous falsehood. 

He looked at her in mournful silence, and she wrung her hands. 

“ Mr. Lewis, what are they saying? Do they know — what you 
have been telling me — I mean about his having sold the jewels ?” 

“ If they did not know ” — began Lewis, then halted awkwardly, 
and in the gathering darkness took her hand in his. “ Do you 
think, my — my dearest, that I would not have paid any sum, taken 
any steps, done anything in the whole world to keep them in ig- 
norance ?” 

The note of rare tenderness in his usually dry, level utterance 
fell on unheeding ears. 

Alas ! she faced the truth now. Already the name she bore was 
breathed upon, and her brother was missing like any common 
criminal. This was the news that awaited her father when he should 
return a little later to a hearth from which peace was thenceforth 
banished. 

How long would it be before the dreadful tidings got into the 
papers and were hawked about the streets as public property, to 
the lasting shame and disgrace of the innocent no less than of the 
guilty ? 

Surely Hector was avenged now tenfold for the wrong that she 
had done him. The mesalliance lay the other way. It was he, 
poor and nameless as he might be, who had the right to shrink 
from the thought of marriage with the sister of Stephen Merry- 
weather. 


part ITITir 


CHAPTER I 

THE USES OF ADVERSITY 


“ The pretty woman fades with the roses on her cheeks, and the girlhood that 
lasts an hour ; the beautiful woman finds her fulness of bloom only when a past 
has written itself on her, and her power is then most irresistible when it seems 
going.” 

It was a damp, drizzling afternoon in November. London was 
looking its worst under the depressing influence of a leaden sky 
and greasy pavements to match. Such doubtful light as had sur- 
vived a sharp conflict with darkness ever since the early morning 
was now distinctly on the wane, and the feeble yellow gas seemed 
scarcely equal to the demands made on it as a substitute. 

It was a day on which the young look almost elderly, and the 
elderly become suddenly aged, and the aged grow decrepit, while 
all beauty both of form and feature seems to have been abolished 
from off the face of a dying world ; a day to make the heart heavy 
that has been light, and to make the heart sink that has been heavy ; 
a day to be pulled through somehow as best one may, but only to 
be remembered afterwards with a shudder. 

To Mrs. Fursden, who had spent most of its hours in absolute 
solitude, it seemed as if there had been many such days of late, 
and her patient soul was beginning to fail her at the prospect that 
there would be many more before the winter which had not yet 
begun should be fairly ended. She had known both poverty and 
loneliness in the course of a tolerably long life, but both seemed to 
be intensified to an extent she had never imagined possible by the 
gloom of a London November spent in a small London lodging. 

Yet the room in which she sat was by no means cheerless. 
There were many signs of comfort and refinement by which a prac- 


212 


THE PRICE OF A PEARL 


tised eye could have detected the gentle birth and high breeding 
of its present tenants. 

If the furniture was commonplace and shabby, its ugliness was 
at least sensibly modified by the soft draperies and graceful orna- 
ments which skilful hands had disposed here and there with a sort 
of studied negligence about the room. 

It might be more of a prison than a home to the two who occu- 
pied it, but at least it did not look like a lodging. And even on 
this dreary afternoon, once the melancholy daylight had been shut 
out, and the hearth swept, and the candles lighted, Mrs. Fursden 
was fain to acknowledge in her own mind that Pearl might have 
had a more unpleasing abode to come back to at the close of her 
daily labors. 

“ I may not be of much use to her,” reflected the dear old lady, 
with characteristic humility, “ but at least I am not a burden, and 
it would be worse for her if I was not here.” 

And then she sighed despondently, for she thought of the days 
when Pearl had the world at her feet, and wanted for nothing, save 
perhaps that one priceless boon which the world could not give 
her. 

The tea was brought in presently, and for the next few minutes 
Mrs. Fursden occupied herself with making her own, and draining 
off Pearl’s portion into a neat earthenware pot, which was then put 
down to keep hot for her in a snug corner of the fireplace. 

But apparently Pearl was in no particular hurry to come home 
and drink it. The time crept on. The tinkling bell of the little 
iron church across the street began to issue a feeble summons to a 
handful of devout-minded individuals whose spiritual fervor w r as 
not affected by the depressed state of the barometer. 

A strong smell of fried fish presently invaded Mrs. Fursden’s 
sitting-room, heralding the near approach of the dinner-hour, and 
the servant had even presented herself to lay the cloth and dress 
the table before the sound of Pearl’s latch-key was audible in the 
narrow lock, and she herself walked in, looking, in spite of the 
dreary evening and the disguise of an old waterproof, so bright 
and vigorous that Mrs. Fursden could not forbear an expression of 
astonishment. 

“ I expected you to be tired to death, my child, and weary of the 
world and every one in it, and instead of that you look blooming.” 

“ So I am. I feel as if I had begun to live again, after having 
been dead and buried for the last nine months.” 


THE USES OF ADVERSITY 


213 


She divested herself of her out-door garments, and her neat fig- 
ure appeared, set off by a dark-blue habit cloth, embroidered at the 
throat and wrists with silver — a very simple, inexpensive gown 
indeed, if compared with those she had worn in former years, but 
no whit less tasteful and well-fitting. And now, as then, it was 
always Pearl who became her dress, rather than her dress that be- 
came Pearl. But, for the rest, the past five years had left their 
mark on her in more ways than one, and the relentless gaslight fall- 
ing full upon her face showed that it was no longer that of a girl, 
but of an experienced woman, who had outlived many illusions, if 
she had also learned some wholesome lessons. She was within two 
years of thirty, and She looked her age, sometimes indeed rather 
over than under it* The roundness of her contours was worn away. 
Like all fair-complexioned women, she had darkened considerably 
as she grew older, and the contrast between her still abundant hair 
and her marked eyebrows was less striking than of old. 

And yet Mrs. Fursden thought often that time, which to a pretty 
woman is supposed to be so merciless, had, after all, dealt very 
tenderly with her niece, and given her at least as much as it had 
taken from her. If the old bewitching flicker was extinct in those 
strange eyes of hers, which had kindled heat in plenty, yet gave no 
warmth, they shone now with a steadier, less fitful light, and still 
by those who looked at them could never be forgotten. To the 
many she might seem only a faded girl who had once been fasci- 
nating; to the few she was still as she had ever been — better than 
beautiful. 

“ I had begun to be anxious,” said Mrs. Fursden, tenderly. 
“ What made you so unusually late this evening ?” 

“ Oh, I have so much to tell you I hardly know where to begin ; 
but first of all, Aunt Emily, look here.” 

She drew an envelope from her pocket, and took from it a nar- 
row strip of paper, pink on the one side and white on the other, 
inscribed with certain words and figures which were apparently 
very pleasant reading. 

“ My dear child ! You never expected as much as that, did you ?” 

“ I should think not. Five was the outside I looked for, but 
this is the first result of my adventure this afternoon. I’ll tell you 
everything when I come down, but now I suppose I had better get 
into my tea-gown.” 

“Have you met any old friend, Pearl, male or female? You 
look so very happy.” 


214 


THE PRICE OF A PEARL 


Bat the question caused a certain impalpable shadow to sweep 
over the eager, animated face, and Pearl shook her head rather 
sadly as she answered : 

“ What old friend have I in the world, Aunt Emily, whom I 
should not be ashamed to meet, even if he or she were not ashamed 
of meeting me ?” 

“ Dear child, I think you are a little morbid about your old life. 
People are more just, and more charitable too, than you are will- 
ing to give them credit for being.” 

“ I don’t know. Pm afraid I should be sorry to build on either 
their justice or their charity. My house would be apt to tumble 
down about my ears. For the matter of that it may still, any day.” 

“ It will, if once people get to know that Miss Margaret Weth- 
erall in private life is called Pearl Merryweather.” 

“ No, no, Aunt Emily. So many people in my position take a 
professional name. I’m not remarkable in doing that, only unfort- 
unately I have to be ashamed of mv own, and that is what makes 
the sting.” 

Mrs. Fursden said no more. She had argued this point with her 
niece many times before to-day, but never successfully, and she 
was too sensible to press it now, or to make any further allusion 
during the evening to what could never be other than a very sore 
subject. 

“ And so it has been a good day for my Pearl?” she said, lightly, 
when the two found themselves alone together during dinner. 

“ A very good day. I begin to feel as if I had got my foot on 
the first rung of the ladder.” 

“Tell me everything from the beginning. You had an engage- 
ment, hadn’t you, for an at-home at some house in the Regent’s 
Park?” 

“ Yes, the Simpsons. I have sung there before, you know, and 
I teach one of the daughters.” 

“ AVhat sort of people are they ?” 

Pearl smiled rather mischievously. 

“ In old days,” she observed, with a sort of dry humor that had 
no malice in it, “ I should have been taught to despise them, but 
it is astonishing what respect I feel now for people who can afford 
to give me more than three guineas a term for my singing-lessons. 
You can guess the sort of company they keep, Aunt Emily, when 
I tell you that to-day for the first time it occurred to one of their 
guests that Miss Wetherall might possibly be a lady. Oh, don’t 


THE USES OF ADVERSITY 


215 


look indignant about it. I have grown quite philosophical on the 
subject, so I was all the more agreeably surprised to-day when a 
certain old gentleman of the name of Donaldson got up and gave 
me his chair.” 

“ Then at least he was a gentleman ?” interrupted Mrs. Fursden. 

“Yes, he was, and an artistic one to boot. It was so refreshing 
to be able to speak one’s own language again. This old gentleman 
began to talk about music, and I soon saw that he knew something 
of it, at first hand, and that there was one person at least in the 
room who would be in sympathy with me when I began to sing. 
And so, as you may imagine, when it came to my turn, I sang to 
him, and to no one else.” 

“ Well, dearest?” said Mrs. Fursden, seeing that Pearl paused 
here with becoming modesty. 

“Well, you mustn’t ask me to repeat everything he said, be- 
cause really, with the best intentions in the world, I couldn’t be- 
lieve it all myself. But, however, one thing I may tell you for 
your satisfaction. He said I had been most beautifully taught, and 
asked me had I learned in Italy. I told him I had lived in Italy of 
late years, but that I owed more to my aunt than to any one else 
in the world, and that she had been a pupil of Costa’s. Then he 
said he would very much like to make the acquaintance of that 
aunt if she would allow him, and I answered for her. So he is to 
come to tea with you to-morrow, which reminds me that I must 
put new frills into your Sunday gown this evening before I go to 
bed.” 

“You dear child!” murmured Aunt Emily, in an affectionate 
parenthesis. 

“ Well, after that I sang again, and he was still more compli- 
mentary, and I saw that he was regarded by my hostess as some- 
thing of an oracle. I am quite sure I may thank him for that 
ten - guinea check. I don’t believe for a moment that they had 
meant to give me more than five. And finally he took me aside 
and he asked me if I felt capable of undertaking the soprano part 
in the ‘ Creation ’ at two days’ notice. It seems there is to be a 
very large private concert at a house in the Kensington Palace 
Gardens the day after to-morrow, and the lady who was to have 
been the principal soprano has fallen suddenly ill. They don’t 
want a regular professional, but they do want some one who can 
sing. So I am to take her place, and the fee is twenty guineas. I 
dare say, if the old gentleman is pleased with me, he may get me 


216 


THE PRICE OF A PEARL 


other engagements. At all events, it is something to have got this, 
isn’t it, Aunt Emily ?” 

She spoke cheerfully, but her face was working with mingled 
emotions, and Mrs. Fursden could scarcely trust herself to answer 
her. 

No one knew better than she did how hardly her niece’s success, 
such as it was, had been earned, and how bitterly she had been 
made to feel the vast difference which exists between the amateur 
however gifted, and the professional however mediocre. 

From any dreams that poor Pearl might once have entertained 
of taking vast audiences by storm in crowded concert -rooms, she 
had certainly been rudely awakened by the experience of the last 
nine months. To obtain a hearing she had found wellnigh impos- 
sible, and it was neither an easy nor an agreeable task to get pu- 
pils. Yet there had once been countless flattering tongues to assure 
Lady Dalrymple’s favored goddaughter that a voice like hers was a 
fortune in itself. 

Pearl had learned by this time to appraise such speeches at their 
proper value, and to know her own limitations. The “ fortune ” 
had turned out to be a very narrow and precarious pittance earned 
by exceedingly hard drudgery, and paid sometimes almost grudging- 
ly, sometimes after needless delay, seldom with real alacrity. 

Even if better days were in store for her, she knew that that 
sharp apprenticeship to failure could never be forgotten. If it had 
not permanently hardened and imbittered her whole nature, it was 
only because she had sounded lower depths in her heart’s experi- 
ence than those of social degradation or material poverty, hard as 
both had been to bear in their several ways. It spoke well for her, 
perhaps, and represented some real gain in her inner life, that she 
had ceased to be at war with the world, although she had not yet 
learned to be at peace with herself. 

To Mrs. Fursden, the most pathetic thing in connection with her 
niece’s altered fortunes was her comparative indifference to slights 
and tacit insults which would once have chafed her to madness. 

“ It is not worth while to be angry,” she had said once or twice, 
when her aunt resented for her treatment which she would not take 
the trouble to resent for herself. “No one in this world can ever 
despise me as I have despised myself, so what does it matter ?” 

In this spirit she faced the world ; and it was her forced smiles, 
not her tears, that always moved her aunt to such painful sympa- 
thy, for she knew that they acted as a mask to an incurable sorrow. 


CHAPTER II 


THE UNKIND WORLD 

“Is there no stoning save with flints and rock?” 

Two nights later, at an hour when ordinary mortals are begin- 
ning to yawn and to think of the advisability of retiring to rest, a 
modest four-wheeler was summoned from the neighboring cab-stand 
to convey Pearl to her destination in Kensington Palace Gardens. 

As all the world knows, the road leading to those princely hab- 
itations is a private one, where such vulgar vehicles as cabs are not 
usually suffered, and Pearl’s driver was therefore promptly chal- 
lenged by a policeman, who turned his bull’s-eye lantern full on her 
face when she put it out of the window to explain the situation. 

Satisfied as to her respectability, he nodded permission to the 
cabby to drive on ; but the incident jarred on poor Pearl, who was 
already in a state of nervous apprehension as to her coming per- - 
formance, and did not require this rude reminder that she was a 
solitary woman, without friends or natural protectors. The splen- 
dor of the house at whose doors she was presently landed brought 
home to her still more sharply the contrast between her past and 
her present. 

She had seen nothing like it since the days when Lady Dalrymple 
had sixty wax-candles lighted nightly in the anteroom where no one 
sat, and which was not even required as a passage either to the 
dining-rooms below or to the bedrooms above. 

Such a blaze greeted Pearl to-night, and a regiment of footmen 
drawn up in a double file on either side of the hall gave further 
evidence of the abundant wealth of their employers. 

These powdered individuals regarded her with critical eyes, 
aware doubtless, since she came alone, and carried a book of music 
under her arm, that she was no guest, but only a hired performer, 
and, as such, in no sense better than themselves. 

She carried herself bravely, notwithstanding, and by the time 
that Miss Margaret Wetherall’s name had been finally announced 


218 


THE PRICE OF A PEARL 


at the head of the great staircase she had almost forgotten her 
previous misgivings. 

After all, she had sung often before in rooms as large as these, 
and as densely crowded as these were likely to be, if she was to 
judge by the innumerable rows of vacant chairs ranged in order 
along the exquisitely polished floors. The only difference between 
now and then lay in the check she was to receive for this night’s 
performance, and a little philosophy was all that was needed to 
enable her to overlook that difference. 

She was received with cold civility by the mistress of the house, 
a gray-haired, handsome woman, in crimson brocade and priceless 
diamonds, who looked as if the pomps and vanities of this wicked 
world scarcely conduced to her comfort, with various degrees of 
veiled impertinence by three pretty daughters, and with an expres- 
sion of faint astonishment by their elderly father. 

Possibly Miss Margaret Wetlierall was not exactly the kind of 
young person whom he had expected to see, and somewhat to the 
surprise of his womankind he took the trouble to conduct her 
himself to the seats set apart for the performers. 

Some few of the guests had arrived already, but they presently 
began to be ushered in at shorter intervals, and before very long 
one of the two rooms was full to overflowing. 

From the disjointed conversation of her immediate neighbors 
Pearl gathered that the concert was being given in aid of some 
fashionable charity, and that a good many of the guests were 
personally unacquainted with their host and hostess. Some of 
them looked about in awed admiration, as if scarcely familiar with 
such wealthy surroundings. Others seemed disposed to be super- 
cilious, as though they had shown some condescension to their 
social inferiors in coming here at all. A few bore the unmistakable 
marks of good breeding. A few more plainly hailed from the land 
of Bohemia, and drew together in a sort of rough-and-ready free- 
masonry. i 

With these last Pearl felt to some degree in sympathy. At 
least they were children of nature, if also unpolished and uncon- 
ventional, and their interest in art and in life generally was gen- 
uine enough to be refreshing. So far, however, not one familiar 
name had fallen on her ear, nor was there one familiar face among 
the many turned towards her save that of her latest patron, Mr. 
Donaldson. He had recognized her from a remote corner with a 
kindly nod of encouragement which at once roused her spirits, 


THE UNKIND WORLD 


210 


and she promised herself that he should have no cause to regret 
his recommendation. 

But her self-confidence was premature, as she perceived before 
many minutes had elapsed. In the midst of the stir and bustle 
on the stage, and through the tuning up of the fiddles, she was 
suddenly deprived of breath by the following announcement : 

“ Lord and Lady Lowick. Miss Watson. Mr. Watson.” 

Pearl’s heart fluttered up into her throat. There was a roaring 
noise in her ears unconnected with any sounds audible to others 
besides herself. Before her eyes floated a blinding mist which 
shut out from her for the moment every single face in the room, 
excepting only those which she would have given all the world 
never to behold again. But them she saw with torturing dis- 
tinctness, and she was aware that they saw her. She knew that 
they looked first at each other, then at her, then at each other 
again, then at the programmes in their hands, as if for confirma- 
tion of her identity. Almost it seemed to Pearl as if she could 
hear their scornful expressions of wonder and amusement at find- 
ing her in this subordinate position. No fear nowadays of “ that 
Miss Merry weather” giving herself airs of fancied superiority over 
her fellows. If they did not actually say this to each other in so 
many words, they certainly managed to convey it to her while yet 
avoiding any glance of direct recognition. 

• She felt, as she sat there just in front of those eight pitiless 
eyes, that she must be turned to stone before the moment came 
for her to stand up and take her part in the oratorio. As for her 
voice, it was hopelessly extinguished. Who could sing a note 
against that wild throbbing in the throat which threatened every 
instant to suffocate her, and whose only natural vent under ordi- 
nary circumstances would have been a passionate burst of weeping ? 

Pearl never knew exactly by what power it was that she found 
herself at last upon her feet, able to stand in spite of her inward 
trembling* and to all outward appearance perfectly composed and 
self-possessed. She opened her mouth, and the notes came out 
somehow. She could hear them, though she hardly felt that she 
was singing. In old days it had been her aunt’s one reproach to 
her that she always felt herself feeling. It w’as not so to-night, 
for she hardly knew what she was doing, and yet there was a ring 
of pathos in her voice that Lady Dalrymple’s protegee had sought 
in vain to cultivate. 

By the time her song was ended she breathed freely once more. 


220 


THE PRICE OF A PEARL 


The worst was over now, and she had not broken down under the 
trying ordeal. There could be nothing worse in store for her than 
this, she told herself, forgetful that kindness is sometimes harder 
to bear than unkindness, and breaks down with a touch the bar- 
riers that hold out against repeated blows. She acknowledged 
the applause that greeted her with a grateful courtesy, and was 
just about to resume her seat, when a signal from her host brought 
the opening bars of the next aria to a sudden halt. 

“ Kindly wait a moment, if you please, while the Duchess of 
Tenterbury and Lord Glendown take their seats.” 

There was a slight rustling, not obtrusive, but stately, of a long 
black satin train worn by a sweet-looking, silvery-haired lady, who 
was led forward with much ceremony to one of the large arm- 
chairs that had been purposely left vacant the whole evening. 
Immediately behind followed a tall, lanky individual, at sight of 
whom Pearl’s throat was again constricted by a sudden fierce 
spasm of emotion. 

Strangely, even painfully, familiar were the grotesque form, the 
quaintly ugly features, and the odd, squinting eyes. Only the 
name was changed, for the title of Lord Glendown, though not 
unknown to Pearl, had not prepared her for the appearance of 
Lord Bertie Meredith. 

With the same air of good-humored laziness that had always 
been one of his special characteristics, he dropped quietly into the 
seat beside his mother, crossed his lengthy limbs, folded his lean 
arms, and rapidly ran his eyes over the programme which she held 
towards him. Then looking up with the sort of bored good-nature 
that has resigned itself to petty martyrdom, he encountered the 
white face and the distended pupils of Pearl Merryweather. 

Not long was she left in doubt that he would recognize her, 
and that publicly. Almost before he knew himself what he was 
doing he had stood up, crossed the narrow space between himself 
and her, and held out his hand in silence. 

For the moment he completely forgot all his surroundings. It 
never once struck him that every human being in the room was 
staring open-eyed at both of them. He only saw her face, and 
remembered with a strange mingling of feelings that it was just 
so she had looked when last he beheld her, and his heart had been 
wrung with vicarious anguish for her misery. His host’s voice 
at his elbow recalled him to a sense of where he was, and he 
started as violently as if he had been awakened from a dream. 


THE UNKIND WORLD 


221 


“ Ahem ! The duchess has been regretting very much, Lord 
Glendown, that she has missed the song that Miss — er — ” 

“Wetherall,” said Pearl, very quietly. 

“ Thank you — that Miss Wetherall has just given us. Possibly 
she might be induced at your request to repeat it, as I see you 
are already acquainted.” 

“ Would it be asking too much of you?” said Bertie, in a low, 
agitated voice that betrayed to her his pained astonishment at the 
role she had adopted. 

She shook her head almost imperceptibly. 

“ I dare not,” she whispered, and her pale lips began to quiver. 

He saw that she was within an ace of breaking down, and ab- 
ruptly turned his back on her as the one chance of saving her 
threatened composure. 

“ It is a very trying song,” he observed, with well-assumed in- 
difference, as he went back to his chair. “ I have had the pleas- 
ure of hearing Miss — Mer — Wetherall sing it before, and shall 
hope to hear it again ; but I think it would hardly be fair to en- 
core it to-night.” 

The master of the [house was surprised ; perhaps also, if the 
truth must be told, a little displeased. It seemed to him an un- 
heard-of piece of audacity that a young person in Miss WetheralPs 
position should negative a request made to her not merely by him- 
self, who was her patron, but by so distinguished a personage as 
the Marquis of Glendown, the future Duke of Tenterbury. 

Little indeed did the worthy man suspect the nature of the by- 
play he had just witnessed, and never for a moment could he have 
believed that a request of more vital significance had once before 
been proffered by the “ distinguished personage ” to the “ young 
person,” and that she had — refused it likewise. 

There were no further interruptions to the concert after this, but 
the spell of Pearl’s success was broken. Her performance could 
at best only be described as creditable. There was no occasion 
for her enemies to blaspheme, but there was equally no exact cause 
for her friends to exult, and she felt herself that she had failed. 

“ Don’t compliment me, please,” she said to Bertie, when he 
made his way over to her after the concert was ended. “ I never 
sang so badly in all my life.” 

“ I wasn’t going to compliment you,” he answered, quietly. “ I 
was going to ask you if you would let me introduce you to my 
mother.” 


222 


THE PRICE OF A PEARL 


“You are very kind,” murmured Pearl, and took the arm he 
held out to her. 

“Under what name?” he pursued, always in the same leisurely 
manner which of old had masked his deepest feelings. 

She paused and faced him with a troubled expression, as if for 
the first time the full difficulty of keeping up her dual existence 
had struck her. 

“There are two, you see,” he said, in a significant undertone, 
“as you very clearly gave me to understand just now. What do 
you wish me to say to my mother ?” 

What Pearl might have wished never transpired, for at that 
moment the decision was taken out of her hands by Lady Lo- 
wick. 

“ Miss Merry weather, I am certain ! Sybil and I thought we 
couldn’t be mistaken,” she hazarded, with a sort of uneasy affability 
which, taken in conjunction with Pearl’s look of haughty displeas- 
ure, at once revealed the situation to Lord Glendown. 

“ It would not be very easy to be mistaken with regard to Miss 
Merryweather,” he observed, coolly, and the tone warned Lady 
Lowick that she had better mind what she was doing if she wished 
to be introduced to the duchess that evening. 

“ We have not met for a good many years,” she said, apologeti- 
cally, and offered Pearl her hand with an empressement that was 
all but servility ; “ but you are looking wonderfully well, Miss 
Merryweather.” 

Miss Merryweather acknowledged both the greeting and the 
compliment with grave politeness. She took them both at their 
exact value, and her eyes, resting quietly on those of the woman 
who had cut her two hours before, said as plainly as eyes could 
say, “ You only know me now because of the company in which 
you find me.” 

In awkward haste Lady Lowick turned to Bertie, and expressed 
her astonishment at meeting him “ in such a house as this, don’t 
you know ?” 

“ And why may not I come here as well as you, Lady Lowick ?” 
drawled the young marquis, in good-humored satire. 

“ Such queer people, you know. One never meets them any- 
where. We were sent our tickets, otherwise of course — ” 

“ We bought ours,” interrupted Bertie, with an imperceptible 
wink at Pearl, which seriously endangered her gravity, “ when our 
host and hostess dined with us last week. They do go out a little, 


THE UNKIND WORLD 


223 


Lady Lowick, though not of course in the very smartest society, as 
you haven’t met them.” 

Lady Lowick, who would have given all the world, as every one 
knew, for an invitation to Tenterbury House, looked thoroughly 
taken aback at this piece of information. 

“ Oh, well, of course — if the duchess knows them,” she began, 
confusedly ; then added, with desperate effort to appear uncon- 
cerned, “ I have always understood that it was a great compliment 
to be known by the duchess, haven’t you, Sybil ?” 

“ Oh yes, every one says so,” answered that young lady, eagerly. 

“ Dear me ! How surprised my mother would be to hear that,” 
observed Bertie, in his most placid accents. “ I must go and look 
for her, and tell her what people are saying of her. Now, Miss 
Merryweather, if you are ready.” He moved on with a bland nod 
and smile over his shoulder at the two discomfited women left 
behind. 

It was generally believed that the future Duke of Tenterbury 
was a little cracky, if not indeed a harmless lunatic, but on the 
present occasion it must be admitted that there was some method 
in his madness. 

“ How long will it be, I wonder,” he said, smilingly, “ before 
that lady gets the better of me, and forces her way into Tenter- 
bury House?” 

“I am afraid you are still very wicked, Lord Ber — ” Pearl 
broke off hastily, and begged his pardon. 

“ Don’t mention it, Miss Merryweather, I beseech you. For ray 
sins, I am unfortunately the only surviving son of my father, but 
I think you know me well enough to be sure that I would much 
rather have remained Bertie Meredith.” 

“ It will always seem more natural to me to call you Lord Bertie, 
I must confess,” Pearl answered, bashfully. 

“ Then pray continue to call me Lord Bertie, or, better still, call 
me Bertie without the lord. Mother, let me introduce Miss Merry- 
weather. She used to know me long ago as Bertie Meredith, and 
she doesn’t think me at all improved now as Glendown.” 

The duchess smiled indulgently, as if well used to her son’s 
eccentricities of manner, and said a few gracious words to Pearl, 
designed to cover her embarrassment at this highly unconventional 
mode of introduction. 

It was not from her evidently that Bertie had inherited either 
his grotesque appearance or his “ cracked ” intelligence, and Pearl 


224 


THE PRICE OF A PEARL 


could only conclude that it must have been his father, who, in Tal- 
leyrand’s immortal phraseology, was “ not so well.” 

Or possibly this scion of an old and honorable family was a 
“ throw-back ” to some remote ancestor, who in the dark ages, 
under the guise of the king’s fool or jester, may have uttered many 
home-truths and shrewd counsels unpalatable from the lips of or- 
dinary mortals. 

Certain it was that Lord Glendown, even as an obscure younger 
son, had constantly permitted himself, and been permitted by oth- 
ers, to say and do things which would not have been tolerated in 
his elder brothers. “ It was Bertie’s way,” as every one observed, 
apologetically, not thinking it necessary to add that “ Bertie’s way ” 
nearly always turned out to be the right way, however counter it 
might appear to run to certain old-established prejudices and smug 
conventionalities. 

His mother knew him well enough to be sure that he had some 
particular object in view this evening, when he singled Pearl out 
for his marked attentions, and she therefore so far followed the 
cue he gave her by her own bearing towards Miss Merryweather, 
as to give her worthy host much food for reflection. 

The “young person” was evidently “somebody,” after all, else 
why should her Grace make room for her on the sofa at her side, 
and why should Lord Glendown himself take her down to supper ? 

Pearl read these self-questionings in his eyes, as he passed and 
repassed her on the way to and from the loaded tables, and she 
felt her lips curling in secret contempt. She could bear the world’s 
slights with more philosophy than its hesitating favors. To be 
unnoticed had been a sufficiently severe discipline, but to be noticed 
in this way and for this reason was almost humiliation, and Pearl’s 
face clouded more perceptibly every instant. 

Bertie, who stood opposite, squinting over each spoonful of ice 
that he conveyed to his mouth, read her countenance with his old 
skill, and presently set himself to answer her unspoken thoughts. 

“ It is worse for me than for you, Miss Merryweather.” 

“ What do you mean ?” she said, quietly, looking up at him in 
feigned perplexity. 

His queer eyes were dancing in a sort of humorous contempt at 
something immediately behind the place where she was standing. 
She turned to see what he was looking at, and behold ! it was his 
own reflection in a mirror. 

“ Do you think it isn’t bitter,” he said, incisively, “ to a fellow 


THE UNKIND WORLD 


225 


who looks like that to feel that a beggarly title which he has done 
nothing to deserve can make people see with his eyes and take, on 
his word, what they are fools not to see with their own eyes and 
not to take on its own merits ?” 

“ I don’t know that they are fools,” Pearl answered, after a few 
moments’ painful wrestling with her own wounded self-love. 

“ Yes, they are blind idiots, every one of them ; but one must 
take ’em as one finds ’em, and rule one’s self accordingly. You never 
would admit in old times that they were blind.” 

“ Because I was blind myself.” 

“ And you wouldn’t have admitted that, most certainly. There 
are a few things I want to know, Miss Merryweatlier — that’s to say, 
if you count me enough of a friend to tell them to me.” 

Her voice shook a little as she answered, shyly : 

“ If I hadn’t counted you as a friend, do you think I should 
have sung so very badly ?” 

“ To tell you the truth, I feared I was responsible for your not 
doing absolute justice to yourself. That’s why I was anxious to 
make you all the reparation in my power. It -was little enough, I 
know, but you needn’t have grudged it to me.” 

“ I didn’t, I didn’t,” she exclaimed, impulsively. And her smile 
was softer and more bewitching than it had ever been in the days 
of her undisciplined girlhood. 

If it had dazzled him then, it almost blinded him now. She 
might not mean it, might not even wish it, but she was still always 
a Lorelei to him, beckoning him on to some impossible goal, where 
only disaster and despair could await him. And yet he only felt 
that he was living when her eyes were turned upon him. The past 
five years had dropped away from him now as barren and wholly 
futile, because in them he had not seen her. 

15 


CHAPTER III 


HISTORY, PAST AND PRESENT 

“Experience is an open giver, but a stealthy thief. There is, however, this to 
be said in her favor, that we retain her gifts, and if ever we demand restitution 
in earnest, ’tis ten to one that we recover her thefts.” 

A great many persons that evening besides the smart waiters 
and the powdered lackeys were surprised at the sight of Miss 
Margaret Wetherall, who had driven up to the house by herself in 
a common four-wheeler, leaving it in the august company of the 
Duchess of Tenterburv. 

It was with beaming satisfaction that old Mr. Donaldson assisted 
at the spectacle, certain now that his protegee’s future was secured, 
notwithstanding that indifferent vocal performance which had at 
first so greatly exercised his benevolent mind. 

Lady Lowick, on the other hand, viewed it with a rage that could 
hardly be dissembled, and permitted herself to make more than one 
innuendo against the character of “that Miss Merryweather, or 
Miss Wetherall, or whatever she might choose to call herself,” 
which, however, fell upon barren ground, inasmuch as her Grace 
was known to be “ particular,” and Lord Glendown was notoriously 
fastidious. 

Meanwhile Bertie himself, sublimely indifferent to any com- 
ments, ill-natured or otherwise, which might have been provoked 
by his recent behavior, sent for a hansom, and was driven away 
westward for a considerable distance, until he reached a row of 
modern gimcrack villas of the sort that makes the fortunes of un- 
scrupulous builders, and undermines the constitutions of unwary 
tenants. At the door of one of these he pulled up his hausom 
and rang the bell, which after a brief delay was answered by a 
young man whose very shabby coat of faded colors had in all 
probability begun life some eight or nine years before as a uni- 
versity boating-jacket. 

“ My stars, Bertie !” ejaculated this individual, with an air of 
good-humored astonishment at the unexpected sight that met his 


HISTORY, PAST AND PRESENT 227 

eyes. “You here at this hour, in full evening toggery ! AVhat’s 
up?” 

“ Apparently you’re up yourself, which is more than I expected, 
so I think I’ll dismiss my cab, unfess indeed you advise me to 
stick to it in this benighted region.” 

“ I do, strongly. Besides, you’ll be sure to keep me up all night, 
if there’s not some check on you from outside in the shape of a 
shivering fellow-mortal.” 

“ We ought both to he in bed by this time,” remarked Bertie, 
placidly, as he followed his friend into a small and exceedingly 
untidy sitting-room, littered at the present moment in every direc- 
tion with articles of wearing apparel, books of all sorts and sizes, 
and various other personal effects indispensable to their owner’s 
well-being, however intrinsically worthless in the eyes of others. 

“ I doubt if I shall be in bed much before morning,” quoth the 
wearer of the shabby jacket, looking about with an expression of 
droll dismay for some vacant seat on which to dispose of his 
guest’s lengthy person. 

“And you’re really off to-morrow?” said Bertie, whose irre- 
proachable attire was, it must be admitted, comically out of keep- 
ing with these very Bohemian surroundings. 

“ Why, yes, if I can get packed in time, but I’m awfully behind- 
hand, as you see. I didn’t know I had so much portable property 
till I came to turn out my cupboards.” 

“ 1 Man wants but little here below.’ I’m always preaching that 
doctrine,” observed Bertie, musingly. 

The other looked up for a moment from his packing with an ex- 
pression of shrewd amusement in his pleasant blue eyes. 

“ I know r you are,” he said, quietly, “ and I always think it comes 
with such peculiar emphasis from the future Duke of Tenterbury.” 

“ Oh, bother my dukedom ! I’ve been reminded of it to-night 
ad nauseam. I’d gladly change places with the surgeon of the 
Archangel if I could.” 

“ I’m afraid you wouldn’t escape the nausea if you did. O 
Lord ! Bertie, how bad I shall feel about this hour to-morrow ! It 
will certainly be a case of ‘ Physician, heal thyself,’” and the young 
doctor, for such he was entitled to call himself, pulled a very wry 
face at the prospect of his approaching miseries. 

“ Are you going to take this with you ?” inquired Bertie, point- 
ing to a framed photograph upon the mantel-piece. 

It represented a young and very pretty woman in the dress of a 


228 


THE PRICE OF A PEARL 


hospital nurse, and across the corner was written in a good bold 
hand the signature of Lois Morton. 

“ Am I likely to leave it behind ? Hand it down, there’s a good 
fellow. I can make room for it here.” 

“ Have you said good-bye to her ?” demanded Bertie, abruptly. 

“ Of course. What do you take me for ?” 

“ Did you say anything besides good-bye ?” 

“ I said au revoir, and so did she.” 

“ That’s not what I mean, and you know it isn’t. You thought 
of saying something else to her when I last saw you.” 

“ I know I did, but I’ve thought better of it since.” 

“ If it’s not an impertinent question, Hec, may I ask why ?” 

“ Well, we’re both as poor as church rats, she as well as I, and 
while I’m away on board this blessed ship she may easily find 
some fellow to like better than me. So, why should I stand in her 
way ?” 

“ As far as I can see,” remarked Bertie, in a tone of leisurely re- 
flection, “ you’re not much poorer to-day than you were last week, 
when you struck me as being rather keen on this business.” 

“ Perhaps not, but I’m more sensible of my poverty.” 

“ What has happened to put you off the notion ?” 

“ I didn’t say that anything had happened, did I ?” 

“No, because that is unnecessary. I can see so much for my- 
self ; but you may as well tell me what it is first as last.” 

“ I have seen a ghost, that’s all,” replied Bertie’s friend, in a low, 
unsteady voice that betrayed some secret agitation. 

Bertie started violently at this unlooked-for announcement. 

“ That’s a devilish strange thing to see in these prosaic days. 
What do you mean me to understand, eh ?” 

“ I mean that I had a passing glimpse this evening of a face I 
haven’t seen for over five years. Perhaps you can guess, Bertie, 
whose face it was ?” 

Bertie shifted a little uneasily in his chair under this direct 
question. 

“ Where ?” he asked, shortly. 

“ At the corner of that private road off the Kensington High 
Street. She was in a cab, and the bobby stopped it just as I was 
passing. I saw her face as clearly as I see yours this minute, for 
he turned his bull’s-eye full upon it, and I heard her voice.” 

“ What did she say ?” 

“ Said she was going to some house in the gardens, and he let 


HISTORY, PAST AND PRESENT 


229 


her drive on. It was just a flash out of the darkness, but I could 
swear both to the face and the voice. So now you know exactly 
what happened. I went on after that to say good-bye to Nurse Lois.” 

“ And said nothing else to her, apparently,” rejoined Bertie, in 
his driest accents, bringing his queer eyes to bear, as he spoke, 
with relentless steadiness upon his friend’s telltale countenance. 

For in spite of all the changes which the past five years had 
brought about, in spite of the hardening influence of his medical 
training, in spite of a severe struggle for the barest livelihood, the 
face of the man who had once been known as Hector MacAdam 
was still strangely transparent, and still unclouded by any of those 
grosser passions which never fail to leave their mark upon the 
outer envelope of the soul that harbors them. 

It was not indeed the face of a guileless youth, unsuspicious of 
evil in himself no less than in his fellows, who as often as not falls 
an easy prey to the first fierce blast of temptation that besets him. 
But neither was it that of a man who lights his torch at unhal- 
lowed fires, and in so doing falls away from his true manhood. 

There was perhaps some trace of unhealed bitterness about it, 
some restless impatience with adverse circumstances, some smoulder- 
ing resentment of an irreparable wrong. But there were no signs 
of reckless life or of misspent energy. If he had been driven out 
of paradise, at least his eyes had not been opened to behold only 
“ an eternal nakedness ” in the world around him. 

“ She might be proud of him,” thought Bertie, wistfully, “ if she 
only knew.” 

“ Well,” he said at last, perceiving that no answer was forth- 
coming to his last speech, “ I may as well tell you that I have seen 
your ghost myself this evening, at closer quarters than you have, 
and when you were saying good-bye to poor Nurse Lois, I was say- 
ing how do you do to Miss Merryweather.” 

“ You’ve seen her !” cried the other, breathlessly. 

Bertie nodded in silence. 

“ And spoken to her ?” 

Bertie nodded again. 

“ Why didn’t you tell me before ?” 

“ My friend, if there had been anything definite, or even indefi- 
nite, arranged between you and Nurse Lois, you may rest assured 
that I shouldn’t have told you at all. As it is, I doubt my own 
wisdom. Why the deuce can’t you drink Lethe like other men 
who are just as good fellows as you?” 


230 


THE PRICE OF A PEARL 


“ Like other men,” repeated Hector, slowly. “ She was always 
so like other women, wasn’t she ?” 

His face had whitened in the last few moments, and its boyish 
look had wholly vanished. 

“ Hum !” observed Bertie, with a coolness that some men might 
have misread and resented. “ You have me there. She is not like 
other women, never was, and never will be.” 

“ How does she look, Bertie ? Tell me.” 

The wistfulness of the young man’s tone and glance was undis- 
guised. Yet his friend’s manner might have been counted the re- 
verse of sympathetic as he answered, briefly : 

“You saw her yourself, didn’t you?” 

“I only saw a ghost. You saw the woman. How does she 
look ?” 

“ A little like a ghost to-night. She’s older, of course. So are 
you. And, like you, she works for her living — pretty hard, too, by 
what I can make out.” 

“ Works for her living ! Why ? Where are her friends ?” 

“ I don’t fancy she has many friends left. Times seem to have 
changed a good deal with her since the days when she w T as reputed 
to be Lady Dairy mple’s heiress.” 

“ By-the-way, what became of that old dame ? Did she die and 
leave her money elsewhere ?” 

“No. Her money is in chancery, and she herself is out of her 
mind, poor old thing. I heard rumors of a stroke of paralysis 
years ago, but I had no idea of the real state of things till to- 
night.” 

“ Did she tell you anything else ?” 

“ Well, by degrees I got things out of her. It wasn’t very easy, 
as you may imagine. Her brother has gone to the devil, I’m afraid. 
I don’t mean that she used that expression, but one can read be- 
tween the lines. Besides, I remember poor Stephen of old. He 
was always one of the Reubens of the earth. He married a plant- 
er’s daughter in South America some years ago, and has absorbed 
a good many thousands, I believe, of his father’s capital, so that 
the family fortunes are perceptibly diminished. That, I take it, 
must be one of Miss Merry weather’s reasons for earning, if not 
exactly her bread, at least her butter, and what the Yankees call 
sauce.” 

“ Surely she doesn’t live alone ? Where is her father?” 

“ Living in Italy. He has a chaplaincy there. Miss Merry- 


HISTORY, PAST AND PRESENT 


231 


weather lives with an aunt, an old lady that you may remember 
going to tea with one Sunday afternoon when the archdeacon 
preached at St. Bridget’s.” 

“You weren’t there that afternoon,” said the other, abruptly. 
Well indeed did he remember that eventful Sunday. But in those 
memories what part had his friend ? 

“ You didn’t see me, old fellow, but I was there. Some one else 
was there, too, and for your sake I wished him further.” 

“ And where has he been all this time ?” said Hector, in a tone 
of quiet meaning which showed that he had forgotten nothing if 
he had learned much. “ He called himself her friend in those days, 
didn’t he ?” 

“ Did he ?” — very coldly and incisively from Bertie. “ I should 
have said myself he was her lover.” 

“ Put it whichever way you please,” said the other, scarcely less 
tersely. “ He had seemed to be devoted to her. Has he turned 
out a broken reed ?” 

Bertie shook his head with rather a curious smile. 

“ He’s a very dry stick, but I don’t think any one could describe 
him as a broken reed. She wouldn’t, at all events.” 

“ But she sees nothing of him ?” 

A note of agonized suspense was in the young man’s voice as he 
put this question. 

“ She couldn’t very well see anything of him, unless she meant 
to see everything,” replied Bertie, in his most leisurely accents. 
“ She is too deeply in his debt.” 

“ What do you mean ?” 

“ I mean what I say, though I don’t always say all that I mean. 
Mr. Lewis stood by her when no one else did, and she may thank 
him that her brother is not now working out his time in penal ser- 
vitude. Fact !” he added, briefly, seeing that Hector’s face was ex- 
pressive of a kind of angry incredulity. 

“ Stephen Merryweather in penal servitude ! I can’t believe it ! 
The fellow hadn’t enough go in him to qualify for that. He 
wouldn’t have had the mother-wit to plan a crime, much less to 
carry it out.” 

“ No, but he had the folly to let himself be used as a cat’s-paw, 
and to bring his sister’s name into the business.” 

Hector gave utterance to a fierce but scarcely unpardonable ex- 
pletive, and looked up from his kneeling posture on the floor with 
eyes flaming as only blue eyes can. 


232 


THE PRICE OF A PEARL 


“Do you really mean,” he asked, emphatically, “that the fellow 
was such a cur as to screen himself at her expense ?” 

“ No, he wasn’t a cur I’ll do him that much justice ; but he was 
a fool, a more hopeless fool even than we took him for, and there 
was a knave behind him.” 

“ Who was the knave ?” 

“ Cherchez la femme” replied Bertie, with true oracular brevity. 

“ What femme do you mean ?” 

Hector’s voice sounded full of perplexity. He did not share his 
friend’s intuitive perceptions, and generally arrived only by a long 
and laborious route at conclusions to which Bertie jumped with al- 
most feminine celerity. On the other hand, the young physician 
seldom overreached himself, and his judgments, if deliberate, were 
rarely erroneous. Just now, however, he was plainly at sea, and 
Bertie regarded him with an expression of affectionate curiosity in 
his odd, mismatched eyes. 

“ I’ll tell you to-morrow,” he said, quietly, “ when I see you off 
at the station. It’s what the society papers would call a queer 
story, and I haven’t time to do justice to it now. But the upshot 
of it is that Stephen Merryweather is lying perdu somewhere in 
South America, or was the last time they heard of him, and his 
sister finds it convenient to give singing-lessons in London under 
a feigned name.” 

No answer for some moments, but Hector’s face was set like a 
flint as he shut down the lid of the tin cabin trunk, which his 
hands, almost unaided by his head, had all this while been 
packing. 

On the polished cover, in neat black lettering, was printed his 
own name, the only one to which he could lay legal claim, inso- 
much as it had been bestowed on him in holy baptism : 

Rector StrmMage, Jtt.ED. 

He pointed to it with a bitter smile. 

“If she had taken that,” he said, significantly, “or at least if 
she had given me the faintest shadow of hope that she would ever 
think of taking it, God knows she would have had no cause to be 
ashamed of it.” 

“ To tell you the truth, Hec, I think she knows that now just as 
well as we do.” 

Hector lifted his head quickly. 


HISTORY, PAST AND PRESENT 


233 


“Why do you think that? Did she— did she say anything, 
Bertie, about — old days?” 

“Not a syllable, but I wasn’t quite such a vain ass as to suppose 
that it was for my own sake she was so very glad to see me.” 

“ Then she — you think that perhaps she — ” 

“ I think that she’s a great deal wiser than she was five years 
ago. But that doesn’t mean that you’re to make a fool of your- 
self now,” with a keen glance at his friend’s face which had 
softened strangely in the last few moments. 

“ Look here, Bertie, if you thought there was the least likeli- 
hood — ” 

“ I wouldn’t tell you if I did. It -would be worse than folly.” 

“Why didn’t I stop that cab to-night?” muttered the young 
man, not so low, however, but that his friend heard the words, and 
promptly repeated them. 

“ Because you’re by no means a fool in practice, whatever you 
may be in theory. You’ve put your hand on the plough, and it 
wouldn’t be like you to look back. Can’t you wait a little longer, 
now you’ve seen her?” 

“ Oh yes, wait, and let some one else step before me. That 
would be just my luck !” 

“ Now, old chap, be reasonable. If she is proof against the 
wealth of Lewis & Ormethwaite, what have you to fear ?” 

“ I don’t know,” with a sigh of such youthful impatience as to 
leave no place for despair ; “ but a year is a long time to look for- 
ward to, and — ” 

“ Not so long as five years to look back on. Besides, what’s 
sauce for the goose, Hec, is sauce for the gander. You spoke 
with great prudence just now about Nurse Lois.” 

“ That’s quite different, and besides — ” 

“Besides be hanged ! It is now two hours past midnight, and 
to-morrow morning at half-past ten you leave the country. What 
do you propose to do in the interval ?” 

“ I could write,” murmured Hector, with a shame-faced smile 
that gave him back at least five years of his vanished boyhood. 

. He looked as bashful as a maiden at that moment, and as inno- 
cent as a baby. 

Half unconsciously Bertie heaved a deep sigh, as he recalled 
Pearl’s worn face and altered countenance, and compared her 
present with her past self. Aloud, however, he only observed, 
coolly : 


234 


THE PRICE OF A PEARL 


“You can’t very well write to a ghost , especially if you don*t 
know the ghost’s address, nor yet the name she goes by.” 

This proposition unfortunately admitted of no dispute, and 
Hector attempted none. Nevertheless, he made one more attempt 
to enlist his friend’s sympathy, or at least to wring from him some 
outward expression of it. 

“ You know now, old fellow, why I couldn’t — say — anything to 
Nurse Lois ?” 

Bertie answered him rather sadly : 

“ You only saw a ghost, Hec, on your own admission, and the 
other is a woman — a very loving woman. I wish you’d bear that 
in mind while you’re away from her.” 

“ Oh, she’ll forget me fast enough, never fear ! In fact, I don’t 
want to be remembered.” 

“ Well, for her own sake, I sincerely hope she won’t waste an- 
other thought on you. You’re not worth it.” 

He held out his hand as he spoke, with a smile that contra- 
dicted the apparent tartness of his speech. 

The other wrung it in silence. They were true friends and they 
understood each other. Only, as in all friendship and in all love, 
one of the two gave more than he received. 


CHAPTER IV 


COMPANY OR TRUMPERY? 

“ Sans peur ni pitie, sans choix ni mystfcre 
A toute la terre 
Faire les yeux doux.” 

“ Mother, I want you to do me a favor, and that is to call upon 
the young lady whom you left at home last night.” 

Lord Glendown and his mother were lingering over the break- 
fast-table next morning, discussing, as was their wont at this par- 
ticular hour, the various social duties incumbent on each of them 
during the coming day and night. 

The son had just announced his intention of running down to 
Southampton to see the last of a friend who was to sail that after- 
noon in the outgoing P. and O. steamer for Bombay. Then, as if 
struck by some after-thought, or by some connection of ideas not 
apparent to any one but himself, he added the request that his 
mother would call on Miss Merryweather. 

“ I had better wait, hadn’t I, till you can go with me ?” replied 
the duchess, after a moment’s hesitation, which Lord Glendown 
noted with considerable inward amusement. He was well aware 
that her motherly misgivings had already been aroused on the 
subject of this same “ young lady,” by his purposely marked be- 
havior of the previous evening. 

“ I think not,” he answered, placidly. “ I have no reason to 
believe that she would particularly care to see me, whereas a visit 
.from you would give her the greatest possible pleasure.” 

The duchess raised her silvery eyebrows and inquired why 
Glendown should suppose that Miss Merryweather would not care 
to receive him. 

“ Oh, because she doesn’t like me !” said Glendown, with the 
utmost sang-froid. 

“My dear boy! You are joking, surely. Last night I should 
almost have supposed that — ” 


236 


THE PRICE OF A PEARL 


“ That we were lovers ?” interrupted Bertie. “ My dear mother, 
till last night we were not even friends.” 

“ I should never have thought you were friends,” said the 
duchess, rather stiffly. “Young ladies do not usually lose their 
composure at the sight of their friends .” 

“ I quite agree with you, mother, and, as I said before, we are 
not friends, nor yet lovers, for it takes two, you see, to play at 
that game. In fact, the best way that I can describe the situation 
is to say that I am not the rose, but that I have lived near it.” 

The duchess looked puzzled. It was plain that this botanical 
metaphor conveyed nothing to her. Her son, therefore, hastened 
to explain it. 

“ In other words,” he said, valiantly, “ she used to be ratber 
fond of a friend of mine, mother, and I have a sort of idea that 
she is still.” 

“ I understand ;” and the duchess unbent perceptibly. “ That 
is quite another matter. I will gladly call on her if you wish it.” 

So long as that very striking young woman with the green eyes 
and marked eyebrows was innocent of matrimonial designs on the 
future Duke of Tenterbury, the duchess was quite willing to show 
her any kindness in her power. 

“But in that case, Bertie,” she added, with ever-increasing 
benevolence, “ she will, of course, like to see you, and I had bet- 
ter delay my visit till you come back from Southampton.” 

“ Please don’t, mother. I shall have other fish to fry when I 
come back. She won’t expect to see me, I know.” 

“ Do you wish me to engage her to sing at our next party ?” 

“ Heaven forbid ! She would think I was insulting her.” 

“ My dear Glendown ! Where is the insult ? She told me her- 
self last night that she had made music her profession.” 

“ I know she has, and you could help her to any amount by 
recommending her among your friends ; but I wouldn’t ask her to 
sing here for all the world. She would look upon it as a regular 
charity.” 

“In that position,” observed the duchess, quietly, “she can 
hardly afford to have any foolish pride, and I must say I saw no 
sign of it last night.” 

“Nor you won’t this morning, either. If there is any foolish 
pride in the matter, it is on my side, not on hers.” 

“Well, my dear, I have no more to say. I did my best to be 
civil to her last night, as I saw you wished it, but I confess that I 


COMPANY OR TRUMPERY? 


237 


don’t quite understand why you should take such an extraordinary 
interest in her.” 

“I was always a queer fellow,” replied Bertie, apologetically, 
“ and you know you have always humored me, mother.” 

“ And your father has always blamed me for doing so. He says 
it is quite my fault that you are so absurdly fastidious.” 

“’Pon my word, I believe he’s right,” exclaimed Bertie, as if 
this idea had only just struck him. “ You have brought me up all 
my life in the idea that there isn’t a woman on earth good enough 
for me.” 

“ And I have never seen one that is,” replied his mother, 
warmly. 

“ Well, mother, whenever you do, let me know, and I’ll see if I 
can’t make my taste run in the same direction as yours. Can I 
make a handsomer offer than that ?” 

His mother sighed, and shook her head at him with a gently- 
deprecating smile. Lord Glendown’s persistent refusal to marry 
and give an heir to the ancient house of Tenterbury was begin- 
ning to be a source of the deepest anxiety to both his parents. Of 
course there was no woman living fit to tie his shoestrings, but 
none the less was it his bounden duty to marry. 

“ Pm off now,” said Bertie, “ and I shall sleep to-night at Brad- 
ley’s. You will pay that visit to-day, mother, and leave my card ?” 

“ Yes, my son.” 

“ And, look here, mother, you might tell her — ” 

Bertie paused for a moment or two, and hung on his heel in 
irresolute reflection before leaving the room. 

“ What shall I tell her ?” asked the duchess, a little loftily. 

“ Nothing. I’ll tell her myself some other time.” And with 
these words her eccentric son took his departure, leaving her con- 
siderably mystified as to the precise nature of his relations with 
Miss Merryweather. Never before had Bertie asked her to show 
the smallest civility to any lady , though he had often enlisted her 
compassion on behalf of overworked dress -makers, under -paid 
female clerks, and destitute old women who had seen better days. 

What was she to understand, then, by this curious solicitude 
lest Miss Merryweather’s feelings should be hurt, combined with 
such an urgent desire to advance her material, no less than her so- 
cial interests ? There was certainly no doubt but that her beloved 
son was, as he called himself, “ a queer fellow,” and if he chose to 
be queerer still, and to invite this “ singing woman ” to share his 


238 


THE PRICE OF A PEARL 


title, the duchess knew that she would have no course but to ac- 
cept the situation. 

Up-stairs his lordship was at that moment giving further proofs 
of his natural oddity by declining to be saddled with a dressing- 
bag when he only intended to be away from home for one night. 

“ It’s a useless luxury on a long journey,” in answer to his 
valet’s respectful remonstrances, “ but an intolerable nuisance on a 
short one. Gi^e me my pipe, Edwards, and fill my pouch, and 
roll up the other things in my rug.” 

Alas ! by what irony of fate was so incorrigible a Bohemian 
lieir to the old dukedom of Tenterbury ? When would he ever 
learn the propriety of deportment due to his exalted position ? So 
doubtful was the valet on this point that he had grave thoughts of 
resigning his situation. * 

Meanwhile, pipe in mouth and baggage in hand, Bertie let him- 
self out of the parental mansion, strolled a little way down Park 
Lane with a happy disregard of appearances, and then, hailing a 
passing hansom, was driven to the Waterloo terminus. 

lie was in plenty of time, the porter assured him. The South- 
ampton train was only now being made up, and the passengers 
were as yet only making their appearance “ in single spies.” 

Bertie peered at these with interest as he stood about and wait- 
ed for his friend’s arrival. Some of them were clearly taking a 
long leave of their mother-country, others were apparently only 
continental travellers ; the amount of baggage being, in either case, 
a tolerable criterion of the length of the journey. 

Presently a four-wheeler drove up to the main entrance, so en- 
cumbered with parcels — big and little, inside and out — that there 
seemed scarcely room for its one occupant to alight on the greasy 
pavement until some of these innumerable impedimenta had been 
cleared away. 

Manlike, Bertie’s eyes rested first on a neat foot and perfect 
ankle, then travelling upwards fell upon a face at sight of which 
his own lengthened visibly, while his lips framed themselves into 
a mute whistle of undisguised dismay. 

“ Good heavens !” he muttered, turning away wfith a haste that 
was positive consternation. “Can it be possible that that woman 
is going too ?” 

The woman in question was of a remarkable appearance, and a 
good many pairs of eyes besides his own followed her as she 
walked into the station with an air that seemed to court rather 


COMPANY OR TRUMPERY? 


239 


than repel these free or curious glances. She was a handsome 
brunette, with a complexion which, whether real or artificial, was 
undeniably startling. She had exceedingly bold eyes, which she 
called into ceaseless play with an impartiality that some captious 
persons might have objected to as unflattering. 

Her hair was waved and frizzled in a manner which at that time 
suggested a decided idea of something worse than mere fastness, 
and her dress also was characterized by a sort of indescribable chic 
which at once revealed the disposition of its wearer. 

In a lower class of life this woman would have been eyed askance 
by her fellows as of more than doubtful respectability. In her 
own class she was barely tolerated, chiefly because she had not as 
yet broken that most imperative of all commandments which says 
to such as it may concern : 

“ Thou shall not be found out.” 

Yet those who best knew Mrs. Mandeville often wondered how 
it was that she had so far managed to keep a place in society, and 
even sometimes successfully to maintain her role as an injured 
woman, when others less conspicuous and less audacious had long 
since dropped out of the ranks and forfeited their reputations. 

Possibly it was her heart that was at fault, or more correctly 
the want of it that stood her in such good stead. Such at least 
was Bertie’s view of the matter. He had always held her to be 
one of those women who in the words of a great and wise writer, 
“ love no man, but love the love of any man.” 

“ And she has gone downhill sensibly since I last saw her,” he 
further reflected, as he watched her from his own obscure post of 
observation. 

Hector was a good deal puzzled by his friend’s behavior when 
he himself arrived at the station a few minutes later. 

The usually placid Bertie appeared to be in an unaccountable 
fever of unnecessary hurry. 

“ Come along, Hec, for Heaven’s sake ! The porter will see to 
all that. I have the tickets.” 

“ But look here, are you coming with me to Southampton ?” 
asked Hector, open-eyed at this sudden move, for which his friend 
had by no means prepared him. 

“Yes, I am. I dreamed you were tumbling down a precipice, 
so I thought I had better see you safely out of the country.” 

“Pity you don’t come the whole way when you’re about it. 
We should have rare sport together.” 


240 


THE PRICE OF A PEARL 


“ 0 Lord, I wish it were possible !” groaned Bertie. “ Come 
along, old chap, do! What are you waiting for?” 

“ Surely I may get a paper 1” remonstrated the other. “ There’s 
really no hurry, my dear fellow. I left myself plenty of time.” 

“ I have hundreds of papers,” began Bertie, with unintentional 
mendacity ; but the next moment he set his teeth fiercely together 
to keep back the oath that was struggling for utterance. 

Mrs. Mandeville stood before them at the book-stall ; her hand 
was on Hector’s sleeve, her face was looking into his, and her eyes 
were sparkling with undisguised satisfaction. 

“ Mr. MacAdam !” she exclaimed, eagerly. “ This is delightful. 
Are you going out in the Archangel ?" 

“ I think,” said Hector, with an awkward brusquerie that would 
have disconcerted any other woman, “ that you have made some 
mistake. My name is Armytage, and — ” he broke off at this point, 
for a sudden glance from those bold black eyes recalled to him the 
identity of their owner. 

She shook her head reproachfully, and in doing so became aware 
for the first time of the presence of Lord Glendown. 

“What! you too! This is still more exciting. Come, Lord 
Glendown, you won’t be so unkind as your friend, and pretend 
that you don’t know me.” 

Bertie removed his hat with frigid politeness, and Hector has- 
tened to offer his apologies. 

“I beg your pardon, Mrs. Mandeville. Of course I ought to 
have known you.” 

“ Of course you ought. Your first patient, too ! Have you for- 
gotten my broken arm, and your pride in setting it? Really, Mr. 
MacAdam, I think I have a right to be hurt with you. I knew 
you directly.” 

“You don’t know my name, I think,” said Hector, with a 
certain iron ring in his voice that warned her she was on tender 
ground. 

His friend came to the rescue. 

“ Armytage, ! think we had better take our seats. Your goods 
are all on board now.” Then, turning to Mrs. Mandeville, “ Shall 
I see you to your carriage ?” 

“ Oh, but mayn’t I go in yours ? It is so pleasant to have com- 
pany, and I don’t mind your smoking in the least.” 

She spoke to Lord Glendowm, but she looked at his friend so ur- 
gently that he was almost embarrassed. 


COMPANY OR TRUMPERY? 


241 


“ I, we — of course, if you don’t mind. It is a smoking-carriage, 
I believe, and we haven’t got it to ourselves, either.” 

“Oh, never mind. We can have one end to ourselves; and we 
have so much to say to each other, Mr. Armytage. I shall not 
make any mistake again, if you’ll only forgive me this once. Oh, 
thanks!” as he took a weighty dressing-bag from her hand and 
made way for her to enter the carriage. 

Bertie followed in moody silence, and a couple of men installed 
at the farther end of the compartment looked up in evident disap- 
probation. 

One of these proved to be a slight acquaintance of Bertie’s, and 
telegraphed across the carriage a silent but expressive glance 
which seemed to say, “ Why do yow, of all men, inflict such com- 
pany upon us ?” 

The other w r as less forbearing, and, addressing himself pointedly 
to Mrs. Mandeville, inquired if she was aware that this was a smok- 
ing-carriage. 

“ Perfectly aware ; but I have explained to my friends that I 
don’t object to their smoking.” 

“ I very much object myself to smoking in the presence of a 
lady,” said the first speaker, severely. 

Mrs. Mandeville shrugged her shoulders, and murmured some- 
thing in an aside to Hector which sounded very like “Disagreeable 
old fossil !” 

The “fossil” was, however, of a persistent nature, and had evi- 
dently made up his mind not to travel in Mrs. Mandeville’s com- 
pany. Crossing to the other end of the carriage, where she had 
established herself opposite Hector, he leaned out of the window 
and surtfmoned the guard. 

“ Take my things to another carriage, will you ? I’m turned out 
of this.” 

The guard looked his amazement, and said respectfully that all 
the other smoking - compartments were full, and the train was just 
starting. 

“ Can’t help it i You must find me another place. Don’t care 
if it’s a smoking-carriage or not, but I’m not going to stay here !” 

There was no gainsaying this peremptory traveller, and in two 
or three moments more he and his portable property had been 
transferred to a neighboring compartment, Mrs. Mandeville looking 
on with undisguised satisfaction. 

“ What fun it will be if he can’t smoke at all ! I do hope the 
16 


242 


THE PRICE OF A PEARL 


other carriages were full up. It will serve him so richly right for 
being so abominably rude. As if 1 had ever objected to his smok- 
ing ! He might have waited, I think, till I began.” 

These staccato remarks were allowed to remain unchallenged, 
but if Mrs. Mandeville had been even a little less case-hardened 
she might have felt herself judged and condemned by the unbroken 
silence that followed. 

Any other woman in the world would have understood that she 
was regarded as trumpery, not as company, by two at least out of 
the three men on whose privacy she had chosen to intrude herself. 
But all that Mrs. Mandeville observed was that the third was look- 
ing at her with unseeing eyes, and she rapidly made up her mind 
that for this singular defect of vision on his part he should be 
brought to strict account before she had done with him. 


CHAPTER V 


TAKEN FOR GRANTED 

“ II y a des personnes qui ont beaucoup de raison dans l’esprit, mais qui n’en 
ont pas dans la vie : d’autres au contraire, en ont beaucoup dans la vie, et n’en 
ont pas dans l’esprit.” 

At Basingstoke there was a halt of ten minutes after an unusually 
rapid run from town, and the train was promptly cleared of most 
of its passengers. 

Mrs. Mandeville, never averse to letting herself be seen and com- 
mented on in stage asides by male observers, stepped daintily out 
of the carriage, and began stamping her feet upon the platform, 
declaring that she was almost benumbed with the cold. 

Hector glanced downward, as of course she had intended that 
he should, noted the arched insteps and the very smart shoes, and 
suggested rather dryly that thicker boots would have been more 
seasonable as well as more prudent. 

“ Come, come ! I can’t have you assuming professional airs just 
yet. It will be time enough for that when I send for you on board 
the Archangel .” 

“ I hope that may not be necessary,” replied Hector, with less 
gallantry than sincerity. “ You said you were a very good sailor, 
Mrs. Mandeville.” 

“ And you are an exceedingly rude man ! I suppose nothing 
would induce you to take me to the refreshment-room and get me 
a basin of soup ? Any one else, I may tell you, wouldn’t have 
waited to be asked.” 

“ I beg your pardon,” murmured the young doctor, in a tone of 
some discomfiture, “ I didn’t know you wanted it.” 

Left thus to themselves, Bertie and his opposite neighbor, who 
had hitherto maintained an unbroken silence, now exchanged sig- 
nificant glances, and each slightly shrugged his shoulders. 

“ Not a friend of yours, I take it ?” observed the elder traveller, 
with one of those smiles which call into play a fine network of 
lines about the eyes and mouth, and always seem to hint at a 


244 


THE PRICE OF A PEARL 


pretty wide experience of life, combined with a tolerably keen 
sense of humor, and perhaps also a rather low estimate of human 
nature. 

“ She isn’t, he es,” replied Bertie, pithily. 

“ I meant the lady. I noticed you hadn’t much to say to each 
other.” 

“ She has noticed it too, I fancy.” 

“ Did I hear your friend call her Mrs. Mandeville ?” 

“ That is her name.” 

“ Wife of poor Fred Mandeville, in the Bengal Civil Service ?” 

“ The same. She’s on her way out to join him now.” 

“ Is she, though ? I wonder how Fred likes the prospect ?” 

“ Then you have heard of her ?” said Bertie, with a note of 
interrogation in his voice. 

“ Every one in India has heard of Mrs. Mandeville. I rather 
wonder that she cares to go back.” 

“ I wish to Heaven she hadn’t chosen to go out by this vessel,” 
observed Bertie, gloomily. 

The other raised his eyebrows in humorous amusement. 

“ Isn’t your friend old enough to take care of himself ?” 

“ He has no experience of that type of woman.” 

“ Well, one thing is certain, Lord Glendown, and that is that 
neither you nor I can give it to him. He’ll have to buy it for 
himself on this voyage.” 

“ Oh, of course,” assented Bertie, still gloomily ; “ but it remains 
to be seen at what price.” 

“ Do you yourself know much about the woman ?” pursued the 
other, always with the same air of benevolent cynicism. 

“ More than she would like me to know, I fancy. She has been 
a good deal talked about of late years.” 

“ Let her know that before she starts. Better to caution her than 
your friend. At his age, no one cares particularly for good advice.” 

“ By George !” exclaimed Bertie, “ that’s not a bad idea. Not 
that I had intended to pester him with any advice, but now that 
I think of it, I have something like a trump-card up my sleeve, 
and I may just as well show it to her.” 

“ Just as well” — with a suppressed yawn which seemed to hint 
that the speaker’s interest in the subject was already exhausted. 

Nevertheless, Bertie felt grateful to him for his shrewd counsel, 
and cogitated during the remainder of the journey on the best 
means of carrying it into effect, 


TAKEN FOR GRANTED 


245 


“ If one were a decent-looking chap, one might try the dodge 
of that fellow in Browning’s poem, who got the ‘ light woman ’ 
away from his friend by making up to her himself ; but that 
would be of no use here,” he reflected, with a mocking squint at his 
own face as beheld in a narrow strip of mirror that divided the 
padded backs of the carriage from the netted racks overhead. 

His opposite neighbor observed the grimace, which went far to 
confirm him in the opinion that he, and many others like him, 
entertained respecting Lord Glendown’s rationality. And certainly 
for the moment the jester was uppermost in Bertie, and his natu- 
rally bizarre imagination allowed itself full play over the notion of 
supplanting his friend in the capricious fancy of this worthless 
little grass-widow. He had sufficient worldly wisdom, for all his 
quaint unworldliness, to be aware that in the eyes of a woman of 
her stamp, his title, had he chosen to trade upon it, would have 
surely counted for something. 

At the Southampton terminus he laid aside the passive role 
which he had hitherto adopted, and astounded Hector scarcely 
less than Mrs. Mandeville by inquiring how he could be of use to 
her. 

“ This fellow here has his own duds to look after, but I, as you 
see, am empty-handed, and quite ready to collect your property 
for you.” 

She looked at him in blank amazement. Nothing ever seemed 
to non-plus Mrs. Mandeville half so much as an ordinarily civil 
speech from Bertie. 

He chuckled inwardly as he proceeded to collect her innumer- 
able packages. 

“ One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight — what a fortune 
for the docks ! I suppose you know you’ll have to pay toll on 
every one of these, Mrs. Mandeville ? And three trunks in the van ! 
All right, we’ll go and look after them. I say, Armytage ! On 
the principle of the condemned man ordering his own victuals 
before his execution, will you just look in at Bradley’s and settle 
about luncheon ?” 

“ Very good !” replied Hector, not without some secret astonish- 
ment at his friend’s altered tactics. 

“And you might as well order mine at the same time,” said Mrs. 
Mandeville, who had begun to recover her presence of mind, and 
now saw the prospect of getting a first-class meal without paying 
for it. 


246 


the trice oe a pearl 


“ All right,” said Bertie, blandly ; “ you would like a room to 
yourself, of course ? See to it, please, Armytage, and then — ” 

“ No, no !” cried the discomfited lady. “ They charge one double 
for that, and, besides, it’s so stupid.” 

“ To be sure, table d'hote is more amusing,” assented Bertie, 
with the utmost cheerfulness. “Very well, Armytage. Then you 
know exactly what to do, and I shall escort Mrs. Mandeville down 
to the docks.” 

He moved on as he spoke, with a nod to Hector, in which Mrs. 
Mandeville vainly tried to read some secret significance. 

But a scrap of paper placed in the young doctor’s hands by a 
porter a few moments later left him in no doubt as to the course 
of action he was intended to pursue. 

“ Private room for us, unless you particularly hold to her com- 
pany !” 

“ I certainly don’t ; but why the deuce is he putting himself out 
to be civil to her now, after having all but turned his back on her 
the whole of this blessed morning ?” 

Such was Hector’s unspoken reflection, and, truth to tell, Mrs. 
Mandeville was putting very nearly the same question to herself, 
as she and her whimsical cavalier set forth together on their short 
journey down to the docks. 

It was a still, gray November day. Sky and sea had blended 
in a sort of melancholy haze that hung round the horizon like a 
thick veil, obscuring, though not wholly blotting out, the opposite 
shores across the Southampton water. 

The year was dying, peacefully perhaps, but none the less surely, 
and the odor of decaying vegetation triumphed over the feeble 
breath of sea-air that blew up from the Channel. Just as the first 
scent of spring brings with it the glad vision of an awakened 
world, so does that dank smell of death depress one’s heart with 
thoughts of mortality. 

It depressed Bertie so unutterably that for some minutes he 
could not bring himself to speak a word to his companion, although 
he had started with every intention of making the interview be- 
tween himself and her significant if not momentous. 

She had small respect, however, for such a mood as his, and did 
not scruple presently to break the silence by a pointed question 
which at once recalled his wandering attention. 

“ Lord Glendown, why has your friend taken the name of Army- 
tage ?” 


TAKEN FOR GRANTED 


247 


“Well, you see, it happens to be his own,” said Bertie, with a 
sort of leisurely - good-humor that often served him as a mask for 
some very definite and energetic purpose. 

“ You mean, I suppose, that it was his mother’s maiden name ?” 

“ No, I don’t,” replied Glendown, still more placidly. “ It was 
given him by his godfathers and godmothers in his baptism. So, 
at least, he tells me.” 

“ That was lucky for him under the circumstances, wasn’t it ?” 
said Mrs. Mandeville, rather meaningly. 

Bertie shrugged his shoulders with a sort of polite indifference. 

“ I really don’t think it much matters. At all events, he has a 
perfect right to call himself Armytage, and I shouldn’t be surprised 
if he made the name famous before he has done with it.” 

“You know, of course, who his mother was?” 

“ Why, yes ; I think it was you yourself, Mrs. Mandeville, who 
enlightened me some few years ago as to her past history.” 

“Yes, but I didn’t tell you that she was Mr. Lewis’s sister-in- 
law, for I didn’t know it myself at that time.” 

“ Mr. Lewis !” repeated Bertie, very slowly. “ You mean Lewis, 
the banker?” 

“ Yes, of course — the man who was to have married your friend, 
Miss Merry weather. How badly that poor girl did play her cards, 
to be sure !” 

“ I believe that is the general idea in society about any woman 
who declines to make a mercenary marriage.” 

Bertie spoke with the utmost suavity, but his softly-uttered 
words had the effect, as he intended that they should, of making 
Mrs. Mandeville both look and feel decidedly uncomfortable. 

“You’re much too good, Lord Glendown, for this wicked world,” 
she said, with an uneasy laugh that betrayed her secret discom- 
fiture. “ I wonder you don’t retire into a monastery !” 

“ There’s nothing I should like so much, but I’m afraid my peo- 
ple won’t let me. I’ve always thought it would be so nice to be a 
Trappist, and never have to open one’s mouth, except to put some- 
thing into it ; but, unfortunately, one can’t choose one’s own lot 
in life,” concluded Bertie, with a gentle sigh, as if of fruitless 
regret. 

Mrs. Mandeville’s mirth over this eccentric aspiration would 
have been less forced if she had not more than suspected that it 
was uttered in mockery. 

“But about our friend Lewis,” he continued, in a tone of languid 


248 


THE PRICE OF A PEARL 


interest which might have misled even a skilled diplomatist. “ You 
said something about Mrs. MacAdam being his sister-in-law V* 

“ Yes, because he married her sister, a younger Miss Armytage 
— don’t you see ?” 

“ It sounds like a conundrum,” said Bertie, allowing his gro- 
tesque features to assume an expression of blank astonishment 
bordering on idiocy, “ and I’m awfully dense about conundrums. 
To this day I never feel sure what relation Dick is to Tom, if 
Dick’s father is Tom’s son. If this is anything of that sort, Mrs. 
Mandeville, I’m afraid you’ll have to explain it to me.” 

She looked at him very sharply. Was he laughing in his sleeve, 
or was he seriously asking for information ? She could not tell. 
His squint would not have disgraced a scarecrow, but to decipher 
the significance of it at that moment was beyond her powers. 

After all, such eyes as his had their uses, as he himself was will- 
ing sometimes to admit, with humorous self-criticism. It was so 
easy, merely by a judicious play of his visual muscles, to persuade 
the world that he was in jest, when it did not suit him to allow 
that he was in deadly earnest. 

And in truth, at the present moment, his one idea was to 
gain time — time to collect his ideas, and marshal his purposes in 
the new and dazzling light with which his brain had just been 
flooded. 

“ I believe,” said Mrs. Mandeville, in a tone of some asperity, 
for she could not endure the sensation of being baffled, “ that you 
don’t want any explanation at all, and it’s all nonsense to talk about 
conundrums. There’s no conundrum in the matter, except, indeed, 
in Mr. Lewis’s own behavior. That’s puzzling, if you like.” 

“Mr. Lewis’s own behavior?” repeated Bertie, with a stupidity 
that was perfectly exasperating to his quick-witted companion. 

“ In taking no notice, I mean, of your friend, who, after all, is 
his own nephew.” 

“ In law,” corrected Bertie. “ Surely one needn’t notice one’s 
legal relations, if one doesn’t like. It’s quite bad enough to have 
to be civil to one’s own family.” 

It was a tolerably cynical speech even for him, but the feeling 
that underlay it was that of painful compunction. 

“ Now I know what the fellow must have meant that day when 
I took him up so sharply. And he was trying to be as nice as he 
knew how !” 

Thus inwardly groaned poor Bertie, while outwardly keeping up 


TAKEN FOR GRANTED 


249 


his character for freedom of speech and disregard of social con- 
ventions. 

Again did Mrs. Mandeville seek in vain to arrive at his real 
meaning, but his face might as well have been a mask for all that 
she could read in it. 

“ It wasn’t an ordinary case, and he might easily have given the 
poor young man a helping hand,” she hazarded, in the hope that 
this time he would at least commit himself to some definite opin- 
ion. But Bertie only said, very blandly : 

“ Are you quite sure, Mrs. Mandeville, that he didn’t ?” 

If ever woman on this earth looked foolish it was Mrs. Mande- 
ville at that moment ; for the question, simple as it was, and inno- 
cently uttered, was calculated to make her feel that she had given 
herself quite hopelessly away. For once in her life she had no an- 
swer ready, and Bertie went on, with delightful complacency : 

“ You know, my dear lady, or perhaps you don’t know, that Bat 
Lewis carries out the gospel precept very literally indeed in the 
matter of the right and left hand. He might have given very ma- 
terial help to a score of nephews for aught that you and I could 
tell to the contrary.” 

“ Well, I suppose, of course, he might,” she admitted, reluctant- 
ly. “ Perhaps ” — with a searching glance of inquiry — “ you mean 
me to understand that he has ?” 

Bertie’s smile was almost mischievous as he answered, pleas- 
antly : 

“ I don’t advise you to tackle Armytage on the subject.” 

“ No, of course not ; but — ” 

“ You’ll find him the pleasantest fellow in the world, if you start 
fair, and begin your acquaintance from to-day. But it’s not the 
least use to talk to him about yesterday.” 

“ I haven’t the slightest desire to talk about yesterday,” said 
Mrs. Mandeville, nettled by this quiet admonition from one whom 
she had been ready five minutes before to set down as a fool. 

“ Oh, well, that’s all right. If you don’t, he won’t. I thought I 
had better just let you know how the land lay.” And in his own 
mind Bertie added, “ He certainly shall know how the land lies 
before I’m an hour older.” 

“ I suppose that you, like most men, imagine that no woman can 
keep a secret ?” she suggested, wrathfully. 

“ On the contrary, I imagine that you, like most women, can 
keep your own secret splendidly.” 


250 


THE PRICE OF A PEARL 


Some impalpable change in the man’s tone and manner showed 
her that he had taken the button off his foil. In the fencing- 
match between herself and him she had hitherto played the part 
of aggressor ; but now she felt instinctively that the tables were 
turned, and that a thrust from such an adversary could hardly fail 
to draw blood. 

There was a moment’s significant silence before she answered, 
very incisively : 

‘‘-When a woman is in so unfortunate a position as I am, it 
is always taken for granted that she has a secret to keep. At all 
events, she never escapes calumny.” 

“ Have I taken anything for granted ?” he asked, carelessly. “ I 
was really only quoting La Bruyere, who knew a little more of 
your sex than most of us do.” 

“ That means, I suppose, that he made a trade of saying nasty 
things about women ?” 

“ H’m — well, that’s putting it rather strongly. He knew all 
sorts, which doesn’t perhaps speak too highly for his own charac- 
ter ; but, on the whole, I think he lets you off very easily.” 

“And pray what does he say of your sex ? Exalts it, I suppose, 
to the skies, and attributes all the evil under the sun to ours ?” 

“ No Frenchman could be so ungallant ! You must read the 
‘characters,’ Mrs. Mandeville. I feel sure you will recognize a 
great many of your own friends and acquaintances among them, 
both masculine and feminine.” 

“What do you know, Lord Glendown, either of my friends or 
my acquaintances ?” 

“ Not very much of late years,” Lord Glendown answered, in his 
most leisurely accents ; “but there was a young friend of yours of 
whom I once knew something, and I don’t mind telling you that the 
moment I saw your face at the station to-day he came into my mind.” 

Stealing a glance at her as he spoke, he was aw^are that he had 
fleshed his blade. Her face was not so much white as stony, look- 
ing as if it had just been confronted with some Gorgon’s head in 
the shape of a very unwelcome memory. For the first time that 
day the brilliant complexion stood revealed as artificial, and the 
sparkling black eyes suddenly lost all their lustre. The woman 
seemed to have parted with five years of her carefully-preserved 
youth during the few seconds that elapsed before she had framed 
a reply to this wholly unexpected challenge. 

“You mean, of course, Stephen Merry weather V' she said, with a 


TAKEN FOR GRANTED 251 

well-assumed composure that did more credit to her head than to 
her heart. 

“That s the man. I suppose you never hear of him nowadays, 
do you ?” 

u ^ no ? fact is, I rather lost sight of him after that un- 
fortunate business about the sapphires in which the poor boy man- 
aged to get himself mixed up. I was very sorry about it all, of 
course, but — ” 

“ Every one was sorry, I believe, who was not angry. You, of 
course, had no cause to be angry ?” 

“ He made a great mistake in running away,” she observed, eva- 
sively ; but if her life had depended on it she could neither have 
succeeded in keeping her voice from shaking nor her lips from 
trembling. 

“ To most people, I know, that was a proof of his guilt,” said 
Bertie, very quietly, “ but somehow I can’t look at the matter in 
that light. I knew young Merry weather pretty well when I was at 
Christ Church, and though he was a great ass and got into no end 
of scrapes, they were never on his own account. Armytage would 
tell you exactly the same about him. Curiously enough, he and I 
were talking of that business only last night.” 

To do him justice, he took no pleasure in the torture to which 
he knew quite well that he was putting her, and for a few moments 
he felt strongly inclined, even now, to let his natural compassion 
prevail over any sterner sentiment, and to content himself with 
having simply frightened her. 

But in those few moments the foolish woman, after the manner 
of her kind, “ plucked down her house ” with her own hands, and 
effectually opened his eyes as to the futility of showing her any 
further mercy. 

“ People were kind enough to say,” she retorted, very sharply, in 
answer to his last words, “ that this scrape was not entirely on his 
own account either.” 

“ Would you be kind enough to tell me, Mrs. Mandeville, ex- 
actly what you mean ?” 

Not often had Lord Glendown been known to look at any woman 
as he looked now at Mrs. Mandeville, and she unconsciously stepped 
back as though he had smitten her. She had committed the most 
fatal of all blunders: that of showing gratuitous malice towards 
the woman whom he secretly worshipped. Almost involuntarily 
the exclamation broke from her : 


252 


THE PRICE OF A PEARL 


“I — I beg your pardon, I was only joking.” 

“ Permit me to say,” replied Lord Glendown, very sternly, “ that 
it is not a matter for joking.” 

“ Of course, I never believed anything of — of that sort,” she 
continued, nervously, for she was now thoroughly alarmed. 

“ I should hardly fancy that you did,” he said, turning from 
her with a look of unmistakable aversion. 

The sight of her ignoble terror was anything but pleasing to one 
who, however eccentric in temperament and cynical in speech, yet 
harbored in his secret heart an almost quixotic belief in the ultimate 
possibilities of frail human nature. 

What sort of a woman was this, he asked himself in cold dis- 
gust, who, not impulsively, but of deliberate purpose, should in- 
sinuate that venomous slander which she did not dare to utter ? 
What was there in her worth redemption ; what indication, however 
feeble, of an immortal soul that might yet flutter upward, though 
on broken wings, out of the mire of its own making ? 

The question was a hard one, and he had not answered it to 
his own satisfaction when, a few moments later, they reached 
their goal. Immediately above them towered the smoking fun- 
nels of the great steamer in which, by some strange freak of fort- 
une, she and Hector were to pass the next few weeks as fellow- 
travellers. 

To her, at that moment, the sloping gangway represented a wel- 
come door of escape. 

“ I needn’t bring you any farther,” she exclaimed, hastily, holding 
out her hand in suppressed eagerness to see the last of this man 
whose memory was so extremely inconvenient. 

But it was not taken. Lord Glendown’s eyes were fixed upon 
her face, and there was a steady flame of pardonable scorn in them 
which lent a strange dignity to his mobile features. Beneath his 
keen glance her own shifted uneasily, and her embarrassed smile 
became a grin as she inquired, lightly, if he wished to mesmerize 
her? 

“ I think there is no need that I should. You can understand 
me, Mrs. Mandeville, quite well without that.” 

Her face blanched at the quiet significance of this speech, but 
she still managed to assume a certain degree of careless composure 
in her reply. 

“You seem to take a great deal for granted, Lord Glendown.” 

He bowed his head in token of assent. 


TAKEN FOR GRANTED 


253 


“ I prefer not to be more explicit at present. If you will take 
my motives for granted, I need not be at the trouble of dotting the 
1 i’s ’ and crossing the ‘ t’s.’ ” 

Once more their eyes met, in a brief interchange of silent ques- 
tions, to which each, after a few moments, read the unspoken an- 
swer. 

“ He knows,” thought the woman, sullenly, in dismay, un- 
softened by repentance. “ She understands,” murmured Bertie, 
with a sigh of unselfish relief. But his victory was of the sort that 
is more exhausting than defeat. 


CHAPTER VI 


A VALEDICTION 

“Every one knows the heart has graves: the foot can scarce tread there 
for the tombs.” 

“ May I be forgiven,” ejaculated Lord Glendown, very dejectedly, 
“ for all the fibs I have told this day !” 

“ I say ! is that a new form of grace ?” inquired his friend, 
looking up from an attentive study of the wine-list with raised 
eyebrows. 

He was tolerably well used to Bertie’s eccentricities, but every 
now and then the future Duke of Tenterbury would pull out what 
Hector was wont to call the “ cracked stop,” and on such occasions 
it was quite impossible to predict what he might either say or do 
next. 

In the present instance he did not apparently take any heed of 
the question which had just been put to him, but went on, rather 
as if he were talking to himself : 

“ The worst of a woman like that is, that she demoralizes you 
whether you will or no. I feel sadly demoralized.” 

“ But bless me, Bertie, why did you go out of your way to be so 
civil to her ? I couldn’t understand your game the least little bit, 
and I don’t suppose she could either.” 

“ Perhaps not, old fellow, but she does now, or else I’m greatly 
mistaken.” 

“ What has she been saying to you ?” 

“ Ah ! that’s just where my fibs come in. I have deceived my 
neighbor.” And Bertie’s sigh was eloquent of self-condemnation. 

When he was in this mood it was quite useless to hurry him, and 
Hector very wisely held his peace. 

After a few moments Bertie resumed his soliloquy. 

“ My neighbor thought she was undeceiving me, and it did not 
suit me to let her think so. So I gave her to understand that I 
knew all about it already, and made her look rather a fool. Do 
you perceive, Hec f” 


A VALEDICTION 


25 5 


“ I have no doubt,” replied Hec, with characteristic honesty, 
“ that I shall end by perceiving, if you’ll explain yourself, dear boy, 
a little more clearly.” 

To himself, however, he admitted that “ the cracked stop ” was 
more patent to-day than he had ever known it, and Bertie’s next 
question simply took his breath away. 

“ Do you know if your mother ever had a married sister ?” 

Hector laid down his knife and fork with a look of displeased 
astonishment, and inquired rather shortly what that might have to 
do with the matter. 

“ It has a good deal to do with it, as it happens. Like a good 
chap, just answer the question.” 

“ I won’t answer it,” replied the other, with a heat he seldom 
showed on any subject, “ until I know why it’s put. Has that 
woman been daring to discuss my mother with you ?” 

“ Can’t you trust me , Hec?” his friend asked, in a tone of affec- 
tionate reproachfulness. 

“ I do trust you, of course ; but — ” 

“ I don’t ask you to trust her. Come, old fellow — yes or no. 
Had your mother a sister ?” 

“ I believe she had, but I never saw her.” 

“You know nothing of her history?” 

“ Nothing, except that she was married. I don’t even remember 
her death. There’s a picture of her somewhere among my moth- 
er’s things. She showed it to me once, and told me who it was. 
That’s all I can tell you.” 

From the extreme brevity of the manner, no less than from the 
jerkiness of the disconnected sentences, it was tolerably plain that 
Hector distinctly disliked having to tell as much as this, and that 
the sooner the subject of conversation was changed the better he 
would be pleased. But, with that curious persistency which is to 
be observed both in strong and in weak intellects, Bertie seemed 
resolved to go on with his catechism. 

“You don’t know her married name?” 

“ If I ever heard it, I’ve forgotten it. I wish to Heaven people 
would mind their own business !” 

“ Do you mean me,” asked Bertie, mildly, “ or Mrs. Mandeville ?” 

“ I mean her, of course,” in a slightly mollified tone. “ T ou have 
some reason, I suppose, old fellow, for what you’ve been saying?” 

“ Of course I have a reason. It seems to me that you ought 
at least to know as much about your own family as she knows, 


256 


THE PRICE OF A PEARL 


That’s why I took it on myself to pretend that you did know, and 
that I knew too, and that she had better hold her tongue.” 

“What does she know that we don’t know — that every one 
doesn’t know ?” 

If the bitterness of this speech was blameworthy, it was at least 
not wholly inexcusable, and, to do the speaker justice, he seldom 
gave vent to a feeling which for the most part he conscientiously 
refused to harbor. But none the less did it clamor sometimes for 
admittance into that secret chamber of the heart where a man’s 
real self lies hidden ; and the very struggle to keep it out imparted 
a certain asperity to poor Hector’s manner which only a true friend 
could have interpreted aright. There was infinite sympathy as 
well as infinite gentleness in Bertie’s tone as he answered, simply : 

“ She told me that your mother’s sister was married to Bartholo- 
mew Lewis, and I have no reason to think that she was lying.” 

“ To Bartholomew Lewis !” repeated Hector, almost in a whis- 
per. “ The man we were speaking of last night ? I don’t believe it.” 

“ Well, dear boy, I do ; and I’ll tell you why, if you care to 
know. When it first dawned on him that you and he were in love 
with the same woman, he asked me a few questions about you — 
what MacAdam you were ? who was your father ? what had been 
your mother’s maiden name ? was she alive ? and so on.” 

A slight interruption occurred here in the form of a muttered 
expletive from Hector, which sounded uncommonly like “ Damn 
his impertinence !” 

“ No,” replied the other, quite coolly, “ I can’t admit that there 
was any impertinence in the matter. He had been in sole posses- 
sion of the field a few weeks before. It was natural that he should 
at least wish to know who his rival was. I saw no reason for mak- 
ing any mystery, so I told him; and I could see at once that he 
knew something about your family, though he made no comments 
and dropped no hints. Later in the afternoon, when the clack of 
tongues had fairly begun, I remembered this, and I appealed to 
him for the truth of the story.” 

“ Well ?” said Hector, curtly, seeing that Bertie paused here, as 
who should say, “ Do you wish me to go on or not ?” 

“ Well — he told it to me, as far as you were concerned. He said 
nothing of himself. He was very nice that afternoon — so nice that 
I went to him again a few days later — after the funeral, you know, 
when everything seemed at cross-purposes, and one didn’t know 
which way to turn,” 


A VALEDICTION 


257 


“/ never doubted which way to turn,” said Hector; and again 
there was that undernote of concentrated bitterness which betrayed 
his unhealed sorrow. “What was the good of going to him? It 
was well you didn’t tell me, Bertie, at the time, or I should never 
have forgiven you.” 

“ I didn’t tell you, because I made a mull of the whole business; 
but upon my word I never rightly understood it till to-day. Now 
I see what the man was driving at when he said you had a claim 
on him. At the time, I thought he meant something quite different.” 

“ He said I had a claim on him ?” repeated Hector, in undisguised 
astonishment. 

“Yes; he said so, but I took him up quite wrongly.” 

“ What did the fellow mean ?” 

“ I have often asked myself that question. He wasn’t exactly 
what you might call encouraging in his manner, perhaps he never 
is. But he seemed upset — that’s the only way I can describe it — 
nearly as upset as you were yourself. He gave me the idea of be- 
ing sore about something, and I imagined it was connected with — 
Miss Merryweather. Then, when he spoke of your having a claim 
on him, I thought he meant it was on her account ; and, knowing 
how the land lay between you two, I naturally repudiated that 
claim for you, and said it was the last that you could admit.” 

“ Of course. What else could you have said ?” 

“ But, my dear boy, I’m persuaded now that he never meant that 
at all ! He meant that his wife had been your aunt, and he would 
have gone on to tell me so if I had given him time.” 

“ How do you know he meant that ?” asked the other, still scep- 
tically. 

“ Because it is. the only explanation of what had gone before, 
and of what came after. I have thought it all over, and I under- 
stand everything now.” 

“ More than I do,” said Hector, a trifle doggedly. 

“ You will, if you think things over for a bit. He knew all about 
you, that I can vouch for, and my belief is that he wished to enter 
into relations with you.” 

A long pause followed, during which Hector kept his face well 
lowered over his plate, and was apparently absorbed in the work 
of mastication. 

Bertie watched him with eyes full of tender penetration that did 
not fail to note each and every sign of wounded feeling, and of 
humbled pride and lacerated affection. It was time, he thought, 
17 


258 


THE PRICE OF A PEARL 


since they were on the eve of parting, that the whole truth should 
be spoken between himself and this friend whom, in the tender 
words of the Hebrew Scriptures, he “loved as his own soul.” 
And so, with beating heart, but unmoved voice and apparent indif- 
ference of manner, he went on to probe that hidden wound for 
whose healing he was so earnestly solicitous. 

“ It was entirely my fault, Hec, that he didn’t. I have to apol- 
ogize to both of you.” 

“ You needn’t to me, I assure you,” in a tone of would-be cal- 
lousness. 

“ To both of you,” repeated Bertie, emphatically. “ I threw 
him back upon himself, and he was justly hurt.” 

“ I regret that very much, but as I had nothing to do with the 
matter, I suppose I needn’t blame myself. And I needn’t pretend, 
Bertie, that I’m particularly anxious to call Mr. Lewis my uncle, 
for I’m quite certain he didn’t much care about calling me his 
nephew.” 

“You’re on a wrong tack, Hec, altogether.” 

“ I don’t think so. There was no reason why he should wish to 
acknowledge the relationship ; and, as you say, he knew all about 
me.” 

Bertie’s answer seemed strangely wide of the mark. 

“ I wonder,” he observed, musingly, “ when you’ll be able to 
make up your mind, Hec, to forgive your father ?” 

The bolt was less aimless than one might have fancied, for it 
found its way somehow between the joints of Hector’s armor, -and 
pierced a conscience that was still by no means untender, if less 
keenly sensitive than it had once been. The young man brought 
down his clinched hand on the table with a force that made the 
glasses ring, and his face flushed crimson as he asked, pointedly : 

“ When have you heard me say one word against my father?” 

“ Never ; but you’ve not forgiven him, and you’ll know no com- 
fort till you do.” 

A moment’s breathless silence, in which the two men looked 
each other full in the face. 

“ I think,” said Hector, very dryly, “ that we had better change 
the subject, Lord Glendown.” 

“ I think not,” replied Bertie, with imperturbable composure ; 
“ and it’s quite unnecessary to give me my title. We’ve never 
quarrelled yet, but we shall if you ever call me Lord Glendown 
again.” 


A VALEDICTION 


259 


“Well then, Bertie, will you oblige me by dropping the subject 
of my parentage ? To a friend like you, I don’t mind admitting 
that it’s a sore one.” 

“ I know it is, dear boy ; so much sorer than it need be that I 
make bold to speak of it, and blame you for your false pride. It 
blinds you, Hec, if you would only believe it, to a far higher son- 
ship than the one you lost five years ago;” 

Hector shook his head with a sad smile. 

“ On that one point,” he said, quietly, “ let us agree to differ.” 

“ I would rather we differed on any other, and forgive me for 
reminding you, but we didn’t once.” 

“ I’m not a heathen, Bertie, even now,” with a little nervous 
hesitation which betrayed some unwilling emotion. 

“ I don’t say you are, but neither are you the Christian that your 
mother once longed for you to be.” 

There was no answer to this direct challenge, but after a few 
moments Hector left his seat, and went over to the window, look- 
ing out in moody silence on the ceaseless traffic in the crowded 
street below. 

It was growing dusk; the short November day was drawing to 
its close, and a chilly mist was creeping up from the Channel, of 
the sort in which ships drift apart, or come into perilous collision. 
In the world of spirits, as Bertie well knew, are likewise blinding 
fogs of misunderstanding whose results are no whit less disas- 
trous. Estrangement or quarrel with his best friend would have 
been torture to Bertie’s sensitive nature, yet he could not regret 
the truthful words that he had just spoken, although it seemed at 
first as if they were likely to do more harm than good. 

He was wise enough not to attempt to break a silence which, as 
compared with any further speech of his however gentle, might 
well be of gold rather than silver. He had said enough to have 
been apparently misunderstood, but he knew that no explanation 
could mend matters, and he did not offer any. 

The bell had been rung, the waiter summoned, and the table 
cleared before Hector looked round at last from his ostensible 
study of a very cheerless prospect, and asked if it was time to start. 

“ I’m afraid it is. I saw Mrs. Mandeville set off just now with 
a male escort ; picked him up, I suppose, in the coffee-room. She 
is certainly a wonderful woman.” 

“ Will you walk down with me, if you’re not in any hurry to 
, get back ?” 


260 


THE PRICE OF A PEARL 


“ Of course. I told you I meant to see you safe out of the 
country, old fellow ; not but what I wish you were going in bet- 
ter company.” 

“ I don’t suppose I shall be troubled much. The saloon pas- 
sengers will be more in her line, I take it.” 

“ H’m ! perhaps so. Depends on what she can get out of ’em,” 
remarked Bertie, rather shrewdly. 

“ Not much to be got out of me, at all events,” said Hector, 
coming forward slowly into the fire-lit room, and beginning to 
collect his scattered property. 

Even in the flickering, uncertain light he looked a very goodly 
specimen of young muscular humanity, the sort of man more in- 
teresting, perhaps, to women than to girls, but sure to find favor 
with both, and wilfully to wrong neither ; yet none the less a man 
in whose life a vicious or unprincipled woman might well play a 
most baneful part. True, such a woman might have no existence 
for him at the outset, but that did not at all mean that she would 
not succeed sooner or later in compelling him to exist for her. 

“ I hope,” said Bertie, in his quaint soliloquizing manner, “ that 
she may not get hold of what there is.” 

“ Why should you flatter the ship-surgeon by trying to per- 
suade him he’s a lady-killer ?” 

Bertie smiled quietly to himself, as he huddled his long body 
into a curious nondescript cloak that strongly emphasized all his 
physical peculiarities, and to the eyes of strangers made him look 
rather like a cross between a poet and a brigand. 

His friend’s question was not an easy one to answer. He could 
hardly tell him what he knew to be the truth, that it was most 
often on men of his stamp — simple, virile, straightforward, and 
virtuous by temperament, rather than on principle — that women 
like Mrs. Mandeville were apt to set such poor remains of real 
affection as their mode of living had not wholly slain. In his 
mental review of what had passed between himself and her that 
day he felt a little of the tremulous exultation of a general who 
has indeed gained some material advantage in a skirmish with the 
enemy, yet perceives clearly that the main issue of the fight has 
still to be decided. 

Was not propinquity, he asked himself anxiously, the most po- 
tent of all factors in the relations between men and women ? And 
what chance had either memory or hope against the constant com- 
panionship of one who was bent on blotting out both ? 


A VALEDICTION 


261 


“ It may sound a queer thing to say,” he observed, presently, 
“but on this occasion I wish the ship-surgeon could be induced 
to flatter himself.” 

“ But why ?” asked the other, surprised at such counsel from 
such a source. 

“Forewarned is forearmed. I want to warn you, old chap, if 
you’ll allow me.” 

“ Don’t you give me credit for better taste ?” 

“Yes, yes; it’s not a question of your taste, but of hers.” 

“Well, won’t you give her credit for more sense?” 

“ She’ll have sense enough to get round you, if you’re not on 
your guard. I told you last night I had heard a queer story.” 

Hector knit his brows in evident perplexity. 

“ Last night,” he murmured — and the deepening of his tanned 
complexion witnessed to the tenderness of his memory — “last night 
— we certainly never said a syllable about that woman last night.” 

“ Her name was not mentioned, I know, but — ” 

“ I may safely say,” interrupted Hector, “ that I had forgotten 
her existence till she4ook me by the arm this morning.” 

“ Perhaps so, -hut none the less she was in my mind last night 
when I was telling you a certain story about a fool and a knave.” 

Hector gave a low whistle, and a look of dawning comprehen- 
sion in his honest eyes showed that he was no longer wholly off 
the track on which his friend desired to lead him. 

“ You treated her once for a simple fracture, do you remember ?” 

“ Of course I do. She reminded me of it herself this morning.” 

“ It was anything but a simple fracture. Stephen Merry weath- 
er’s career was broken that night before it had properly begun, 
and his sister’s peace of mind, and his father’s chance of being 
raised to the episcopate. I can tell you, my dear boy, that it 
would have taken a greater skill than yours to mend all those 
fractures.” 

Still, Hector’s matter-of-fact and downright intelligence seemed 
to find some difficulty in grasping the idea conveyed by this meta- 
phorical language. 

“ You don’t mean,” he began, doubtfully, “ you surely can’t 
mean that — ” 

“ I mean this,” replied Bertie, with the slightly impatient utter- 
ance of one who is resolved that there shall be no further doubt 
about the matter: “last night I told you to look for the woman, 
and to-day I tell you she is found.” 


CHAPTER VII 


REMEMBER OR FORGET ? 

“ 0 puissance du temps ! 0 legfcres annfees ! 

Vous emportez nos pleurs, nos cris, et nos regrets ; 

Mais la piti6 vous prend, et sur nos fleurs fandes 
Yous ne marchez jamais.” 

That “ nothing succeeds like success ” is a proposition which ad- 
mits of no dispute ; but whether such success is in the first instance so 
much meritorious as adventitious cannot always be decided offhand. 

Pearl, at all events, was by no means disposed to overrate her own 
share in the matter when it became evident that, in the words of 
our French neighbors, Miss Margaret Wetherall had “ arrived.” She 
was aware that Lord Glendown’s title counted for more than her 
talent in the eyes of a world which is always less careful to in- 
quire what is said than who said it. And if the knowledge saved 
her from conceit, it scarcely left her personal pride uninjured. 

As the days went on, moreover, and Bertie showed no sign of 
wishing to follow up his renewed acquaintance with her, Pearl’s 
grateful sentiments were dashed by a feeling of unaccountable disap- 
pointment in his character. 

Why did he not come to see her himself instead of sending his 
mother, who, albeit perfectly courteous as befitted her exalted posi- 
tion, could not entirely lay aside a certain stately patronage in her 
manner and bearing, which was intended to convey to Pearl that 
she must not in any way trade upon her by-gone intimacy with Lord 
Bertie Meredith ? 

That the duchess should regard her somewhat askance was not 
unnatural. Mothers are proverbially suspicious of feminine designs 
upon their eligible sons, while ready at the same time fiercely to re- 
sent for them any failure of feminine appreciation. 

But surely Bertie himself knew better ? Surely there was no need 
for him to force home upon her consciousness the substantial differ- 
ence that existed between his present and past self ? Had he been 
desirous of keeping himself ever in her thoughts, he could have 


REMEMBER OR FORGET? 


263 


adopted no better method than that of pointedly absenting himself 
from her presence. But, in truth, he was guiltless of any such de- 
sire, as he was also unaware that, in shrinking from giving himself 
pain, he was depriving her of some pleasure. 

The riddle which her green eyes had ever held for him was un- 
fathomable, so far as he was concerned, and self-respect no less than 
that discretion which is called “the better part of valor” forbade 
him to give chase to the fleeting shadow of his own fancy. 

And yet he had been sorely tempted, after parting from Hector 
Armytage on board the Archangel , to go and see her through Hec- 
tor’s eyes, and to discover for himself, if that indeed were possible, 
how far she was willing to remember the past and allow it to influ- 
ence the future. 

Next day, however, he was wiser. Only a fool, as he reflected 
soberly, would go on such a fool’s errand as to try to interpret an 
unwon woman’s heart to an undeclared lover. 

And so it befell that November darkened into December, and De- 
cember was fast freezing into the Christmas holidays, before any 
further communication took place between Lord Glendown and 
Pearl Merryweather. 

It was, as it usually is, the woman, not the man, who made the 
first move in the matter. 

Early one morning, towards the end of December, Bertie received 
the following note, and read it with a sudden quickening of his 
pulses that convinced him, if indeed he had need of conviction, how 
far he was still from the attainment of that “ holy indifference ” 
which it is so easy to preach and so hard to practise: 

“ Dear Lord Glendown, — I feel sure that I have to thank you 
for the enclosed offer, but I hope you will not count me ungrate- 
ful if I decline the engagement. Under ordinary circumstances I 
should have had much pleasure in accepting it, but my circum- 
stances, as you are aware, are not ordinary. Trusting that you 
will not misconstrue my action, I remain, 

“ Yours sincerely, Pearl Merryweather.” 

The enclosure was a politely-worded letter, in a stiff, official hand, 
addressed to “ Miss Margaret Wetherall,” requesting her, if disen- 
gaged on the last day of the year, to sing a couple of songs at 
a certain musical entertainment to be given that evening to the in- 
patients of St. Basil’s Hospital. The whole point of the communi- 
cation lay in the signature : “ Bartholomew Lewis, Hon. Treasurer.” 


264 


THE PRICE OF A PEARL 


“By George!” murmured Bertie, “that’s the oddest coincidence 
I’ve known for many a long day, and I suppose nothing will ever in- 
duce her to believe that I’m as innocent of it as the babe unborn.” 

A little diplomatic pumping of his mother, who, as he knew, 
was influential on the Executive Committee of St. Basil’s Hospital, 
elicited from her the information that she, and she alone, was the 
person to whom Pearl’s thanks (he took care to accentuate them) 
were due on this occasion. 

“And I presume,” added her Grace, with her old-fashioned stateli- 
ness of bearing, “that the young lady will have no objection to ac- 
cept the engagement offered by the committee?” 

“ Oh, dear, no !” replied Bertie, with an amiable haste that over- 
looked strict veracity. But, as he assured himself apologetically, 
her objections were not invincible, and should be overcome before 
the red disc at present doing duty for the sun was finally swallowed 
up in the gloom of a December afternoon. 

To be sure, a personal interview was altogether unnecessary. Of 
the fact that he wished to convey to her Pearl might quite well have 
been put in possession by a few carefully expressed lines. Appar- 
ently, however, those few lines were more than he could manage, 
and, after having torn up nearly a quire of his mother’s favorite note- 
paper in the vain attempt to indite a satisfactory epistle, he relin- 
quished the task as beyond his intellectual capacity. Somewhat 
later in the day his long legs conveyed him across the park in the 
direction of that widely comprehensive region known as South Ken- 
sington. He was aware that it included remote and back-lying 
streets, as well as spacious squares and fashionable gardens, and that 
Pearl’s temporary abode was by no means a luxurious one. 

But he had scarcely realized the revolutionary nature of her 
change of circumstances until he found himself groping up the nar- 
row, dark staircase leading to her very modest apartments. True, 
she had moved to the drawing-room floor since her meeting with 
him on that eventful evening, but it is to be doubted whether Lord 
Glendown could have fully appreciated the significance of this mi- 
gration, or guessed the untold relief afforded by such comparative 
immunity as she and Mrs. Fursden now enjoyed alike from kitchen 
noise and kitchen smells. 

All that he could take in at present was the astounding contrast 
between Lady Dalrymple’s sumptuous mansion and this dingy Lon- 
don lodging. 

Miss Wetherall was out, the maid informed him, but Mrs. Furs- 


REMEMBER OR FORGET? 


265 


den was at home, and would be pleased to see him if he would step 
up-stairs. 

Bertie “stepped up” accordingly, not without some fear of 
knocking off the plaster from the low ceiling, and was ushered into 
the presence of an infirm old lady who had evidently been taking 
advantage of the waning daylight to indulge in a short nap. She 
looked decidedly flustered when the maid announced Lord Glen- 
down, and it was quite plain to the most ordinary intelligence that 
the name conveyed nothing to her. He himself, therefore, pro- 
ceeded to supplement the servant’s announcement by saying, plain- 
tively : 

“Known in happier days as Bertie Meredith.” 

Her face lighted up immediately. She had evidently heard of 
that eccentric individual, and was prepared to welcome him. 

“ I must introduce myself,” she began, looking about her as she 
spoke for her trusty stick, that she might rise to do honor to her 
niece’s benefactor. 

“There is no need,” he answered, with a friendly squint, “and 
please don’t stir, Mrs. Fursden. No one who has ever had the pleas- 
ure of seeing you could possibly forget you.” 

Pearl’s aunt looked, as she felt, considerably puzzled. The speak- 
er himself was not a person to be forgotten, yet never before, to her 
knowledge, had she met those queer eyes of his, which were now 
regarding her with such an odd mixture of shrewd penetration and 
kindly amusement. 

“You don’t recall our meeting?” he asked, pleasantly. 

“ I’m afraid I don’t,” she admitted, with a polite reluctance that 
feared to hurt her new visitor’s feelings. 

“ In point of fact, it never took place. Please don’t look so sur- 
prised, Mrs. Fursden. I really have had the pleasure of seeing you 
once, but I must confess to having taken great pains on that occa- 
sion that you should not see me.” 

Mrs. Fursden could not help laughing at this quaintly candid 
avowal. 

“You were in the company of a friend of mine,” continued 
Bertie, in his most leisurely manner. “ I wonder if you remember 
him ? He was known in those days as Hector MacAdam.” 

By the troubled expression that overshadowed the old lady’s sweet 
and sympathetic countenance he judged at once that she did remem- 
ber, and that her memory was further quickened by regret. 

“ I didn’t know that he was a friend of yours, Lord Glendown, 


266 


THE PRICE OF A PEARL 


and I’m afraid he would hardly have counted me as a friend of his, 
for we only met once.” 

“ It was as a friend of Miss Merry weather’s, I fancy, that he was 
introduced to you ?” said Bertie, in a tone of quiet significance which 
made Pearl’s aunt blush almost as deeply as if she had been Pearl 
herself. 

But, although she thus changed color, she did not lose her com- 
posure as she answered, with a grave dignity that conveyed a tacit 
reproof to her visitor : 

“You probably know more than I do, Lord Glendown.” 

“ Pardon me !” he exclaimed, hastily. “ I didn’t put the question 
in a spirit of idle curiosity. Anything I do know on the subject 
was told to me at first-hand by the two people most nearly con- 
cerned. And that’s my only excuse for what I said just now.” 

“Nothing was ever told to me,” said Mrs. Fursden, rather sadly. 

To Bertie’s understanding ears, the tone betrayed some wounded 
feeling. 

“ Perhaps,” he observed, with a penitent smile which went far to 
atone for his late indiscretion, “ I had no business to remember what 
was told to me, only — you see — I’ve been reminded of it very 
lately.” 

“Not surely — by anything that my niece could have said to 
you ?” 

The old lady spoke impulsively, and both speech and manner 
were eloquent of an amazement bordering on incredulity. Bertie 
could discern at once that Pearl was not in the habit of saying much 
to the person who might most naturally have been taken for her con- 
fidante. 

“ No,” he answered, in his slow musing tone. “ It was more what 
Miss Merryweather left unsaid that made me fancy — perhaps it was 
only fancy — that she remembered old days. Or at least,” he added, 
after a few moments, seeing that Mrs. Fursden did not take up this 
indirect challenge, “ that she had not been able to forget them ?” 

This time there was a note of interrogation in his voice, and a 
look of frank inquiry in his face, which Mrs. Fursden could not for 
the life of her either ignore or resent. 

Yet to discuss Pearl’s feelings with a total stranger was certainly 
the last thing she would ever have done in cold blood or of set pur- 
pose. 

“You are her friend, Lord Glendown?” she said, rather wist- 
fully. 


REMEMBER OR FORGET V 


267 


“I am his friend,” replied Bertie, with something of an effort. 
“At one time I think that would have made me hers. Perhaps 
it does still ?” 

“Perhaps it does, but — she tells me nothing, and I know noth- 
ing” 

“ I always imagined somehow* that women knew things without 
being told,” persisted Bertie. 

“They think they do, at all events, but in this instance — ” she 
broke off, with a faint smile that ended in a sigh. 

“ In this instance,” he repeated, earnestly. “ Forgive me if I seem 
impertinent, Mrs. Fursden, but I really have the best of reasons for 
wanting to know.” 

“Then you must ask my niece herself; and here she comes,” as 
the door opened, and a shadowy form was visible through the deep- 
ening gloom. 

“Who is it?” said Pearl, advancing with a little graceful uncer- 
tainty into the doubtful light afforded by a somewhat languishing 
fire. 

“ It is a court jester,” responded Bertie, as he hastily dislodged 
his long body from the hammock-chair in which he had been repos- 
ing — “a court jester, who once danced with Undine.” 

“ Having first taken her for Lorelei,” Pearl answered, with a touch 
of her old mockery, as she gave him her hand. 

“ How unkind of you to remember that, Miss Merry weather !” 

“ Oh, I forget nothing — nothing, at least, that it is salutary to re- 
member.” 

“I should like to be quite sure on that point. Will you let me 
test your memory presently by a few innocent questions?” 

“About the dress Undine wore, for instance, or the colors of the 
jester’s motley suit?” suggested Pearl, composedly. 

But, coolly as she spoke, he noted secretly that her hand trembled 
a little as she took up the poker and stirred the slumbering fire into 
a sudden vivid blaze. 

“ Let me do that,” he said, with a subtle change both of tone and 
manner which greatly exercised Mrs. Fursden. “ I have surely known 
you long enough ?” 

“ Thanks, it is done ; but you and Aunt Emily between you would 
have let the fire out in another quarter of an hour.” . 

“ Mrs. Fursden, won’t you come to my defence ?” he asked, quaint- 
lv. “ I’m not such a fool as I look, am I ?” 

“ Not nearly,” said the old lady, with an emphasis that might 


268 


THE PRICE OF A PEARL 


have been misread by a more sensible man than this eccentric 
marquis. 

He, however, had sufficient sense of humor to burst into a hearty 
fit of laughter, in which neither of the others could help joining. 

“ After that,” he observed, with mock humility of manner, “ I had 
better live up to my reputation, and explain my errand.” 

“ Does that mean that some one has sent you ?” demanded Pearl, 
rather abruptly, struck perhaps by some secret significance in the 
twinkle of the man’s eyes. 

“ Not at all. It is my own errand, a fool’s one, perhaps, but still 
— it concerns you, Miss Merry weather, and, as I find it easier to 
speak than to write, perhaps you will let me explain it in propria 
persona ?” 

“Did you get my letter?” 

Bertie nodded good-humoredly. 

“Yes, I got a letter this morning, the gist of which was practi- 
cally ‘ Thank you for nothing.’ No — please, please don’t interrupt 
me, Miss Merryweather. You were perfectly justified from your 
own point of view, only you see it happened to be a wrong one.” 

“ But indeed,” began Pearl, very earnestly, “ I never meant — ” 

“To crush the poor fool ? Well, he isn’t crushed, because in this 
instance he is innocent. My mother was the culprit, so I took it 
upon myself to convey your thanks to her, elegantly worded, of 
course, and she was greatly pleased at having been of some slight 
service to you.” 

“But, Lord Glendown,” in a tone of evident dismay and disap- 
pointment, “ I felt quite sure you would have understood the im- 
possibility of my accepting the engagement.” 

He perceived that the moment for jesting had gone by, and his 
mischievous smile gave place to an expression of almost feminine 
solicitude. 

“ No one understands better than I do,” he answered, very gently, 
“ but — er — you wrote under a misapprehension. You need have no 
fear of meeting— any one that — you don’t wish to meet.” 

He looked round as he spoke as if to appeal to Mrs. Fursden, but 
found that she had taken advantage of the servant’s entrance with 
the lamps to effect a noiseless escape. 

Inwardly blessing the old lady for her fine tact, he turned again to 
Pearl, and looked at her with eyes in which unselfish tenderness and 
futile insensate longing were somehow strangely blended. It had 
been so easy, comparatively speaking, to steel his heart against her 


REMEMBER OR FORGET? 


269 


in the old days when the world was at her feet, and lovers followed 
in her train, and she would fain have counted him among them. 
But now — now , when her eyes were glistening with unshed tears, 
and her smile was forced, and her voice unsteady, what chance had 
he of keeping the doors guarded and the bolts drawn ? 

“ Won’t you trust me?” he asked, wistfully. “ Won’t you count 
me as — your friend ?” 

“ I will, I do ; but when I got that letter last night — ” 

“ You were frightened, naturally enough, but there is no need to 
be frightened. His name appears, I know, on these occasions, but 
he never appears himself.” 

“You are quite sure of that?” still doubtfully, but with a deli- 
cious little sigh that breathed relief. 

“ Absolutely sure. I’ll go bail for his absence, and you have it 
in your power to give such pleasure — more than you know, Miss 
Merry weather.” 

For whom was he pleading so earnestly — for himself or for 
another ? She looked at him with questioning eyes, but said noth- 
ing. 

“ Do you know that hospital ?” he asked her, nervously. “ Have 
you ever been over it ?” 

“ No, I never have. Of course I have heard of it often.” 

“ It is supported, you know, by voluntary contributions. Mr. 
Lewis has been honorary treasurer for about a year, and I needn’t 
say they get about half as much again out of the public as they 
used.” 

“Yes?” 

She did not mean to question the assertion, but she rather won- 
dered why it had been made, for he spoke more as if he were re- 
citing an unpleasant lesson than conveying a piece of at least pre- 
sumably interesting information. 

“ I used to go there a good deal at one time,” continued Bertie, 
shifting his long legs with a sort of awkward impatience that was 
curiously reminiscent of old Fingall days. “ A friend of mine 
learned most of his business there, and acted as house-surgeon for a 
year. He was a friend of yours once, if I remember rightly.” 

Silence for a few interminable moments, in which Bertie again 
uneasily changed his posture and contemplated his boots with ap- 
parently absorbing interest. He was aware that Pearl was a past- 
mistress of that particular sort of acting which requires neither 
stage nor footlights, and deals rather with tragedy than with comedy. 


270 


THE PRICE OF A PEARL 


An audience of one may suffice for such a drama, ending — God 
knows — often enough in broken hearts and shattered ideals and out- 
raged beliefs. Was he to act as such an audience now, or would 
she do as he had besought her a few minutes back, count her lover’s 
friend as her own, and let him read her heart whether it were emp- 
ty or whether it were full ? 

Tick-tick, tick-tick — he knew not how many times he listened to 
time’s gentle pulsation in the painted clock above his head before 
she asked him, tremblingly : 

“ When you said just now that I could — give pleasure — more 
pleasure — than I — knew of — did you mean to him ?” 

He breathed freely. In that halting utterance he read reality. 
The days were past when she would have wronged her best self by 
feigning an indifference that she did not really feel. 

“ He is not there,” said Bertie, softly, “ but — he would — hear of 
your being there if you went.” 

Did she ever guess by what a superhuman effort he kept his eyes 
from reading her face, lighted up as he knew it was by a tenderness 
that could not be hidden ? No, her thoughts were not of him. At 
that moment he had no existence for her. 

“ I had made my aunt write to refuse,” she said, presently, speak- 
ing more to herself than to him. 

Nevertheless he answered, quickly : 

“ That can be managed if you will give me leave.” 

Again she hesitated for a moment. 

“You are sure I shall not meet — any one?” 

He nodded a silent assurance, still gazing vacantly at the fire, at 
the clock, at the ornaments on the mantel-piece — anywhere but at her. 

“ Then if you think that your mother would like it, and — if you 
wish me to accept the engagement — ” 

There he interrupted her almost sharply. 

“ Please leave me out of the reckoning. I have no wishes — one 
way or the other.” 

She looked at him in astonishment. 

“ I thought you meant — I understood that you wanted — ” 

Bertie started to his feet, nearly overturning the tea-table as he 
did so. 

“ It’s awfully late, and I must be off. Then I may arrange for a 
song — two songs, perhaps — by Miss Margaret Wetherall. Thanks. 
Don’t ring, please ; I’ll let myself out. Good-night, Miss Merry- 
weather.” 


REMEMBER OR FORGET? 


271 


Even then his restless eyes refused to meet hers, and he made his 
way to the door with the uncertain gait of a drunkard or a lunatic. 

She did not know then, not till long afterwards, that a man may 
be so torn asunder by conflicting passions as to seem — for the time 
being — literally beside himself. 


CHAPTER VIII 


THE OTHER WOMAN 

, “ Alas ! I am weak ; I well might know 
This gladness betokens some future woe.” 

The last day of that year of grace, 187—, was not of a sort to 
leave room for any sentimental regrets over its vanished predeces- 
sors. Bleak and gloomy and gusty it dawned ; bleaker and gloom- 
ier and gustier it wore on till evening, when the wind suddenly 
dropped, and a steady rain began to pour down upon those luckless 
individuals who were still trudging the dreary, darkening London 
streets. 

“ It will go on like this all night, I suppose,” said Pearl, looking 
out for a few moments on the singularly cheerless prospect, before 
drawing down the blinds and struggling with refractory curtains. 

And yet there was no corresponding gloom on her face, as her 
aunt had already noticed, not without some silent wonder, inas- 
much as Pearl’s spirits usually went up and down with the barom- 
eter. To be sure, the latter was not unduly depressed at the pres- 
ent moment — an additional reason for resenting the appearance of 
this unlooked-for and unwelcomed rain. But the weather was atro- 
cious, no one could call it otherwise ; yet Pearl seemed strangely 
blithe, notwithstanding, and moved about the room with a sort of 
irrepressible elation of bearing and expression that every now and 
then found vent in a snatch of joyous song. It was as if she had 
heard that “ good news from a far country ” which is “ as cold 
waters to a thirsty soul.” 

“ Are you going to sing that song to-night?” her aunt asked her, 
abruptly, after having watched her in observant silence for some 
minutes. 

“ Oh no ! I don’t think it would be at all suitable at this time 
of year.” 

“ I forget the name of it,” persisted Mrs. Fursden, for her quick 
eyes had detected that Pearl was, for some reason or other, blushing 
deeply. 


THE OTHER WOMAN 


273 


“ It is Stanford’s ‘ Spring Song.’ You taught it to me long ago. 
I don’t know why I should be singing it to-night.” 

Did she not know why, or was it only in unconscious cerebration 
that that old refrain had risen to her lips ? — 

“Of a love born on a May morn.” 

To Mrs. Fursden, at all events, the sound had brought back a 
far-away memory of a bright spring morning, of a girl’s clear ring- 
ing voice, of a youth’s eager listening face just visible below the 
screen formed by the flowering wistaria, and of that idle fancy in 
her own mind which there and then had connected the one with the 
other. 

“ Don’t go away, child. You needn’t dress just yet, surely. Will 
Lord Glendown be there to-night?” 

“ I don’t know,” replied Pearl ; and from the way in which she 
said these words, they might easily have been interpreted to mean 
“ I don’t care whether he is or not.” 

“ Are you a little heartless about him, Pearl ? To me it is so 
plain that he cares for you. Somehow I felt it in his manner that 
afternoon, even before you came in.” 

“I don’t think I am heartless, Aunt Emily, and he’s the best 
friend I have in the world; but — that is all. Even his mother 
must have found out by this time that there was no need to be 
alarmed.” 

“ My dear child — mother or no mother, the ball is at your feet if 
you choose to pick it up.” 

Pearl shook her head with a curious, inscrutable smile. 

“ That ball will never ask me to pick it up.” 

“ But — none the less, you may tread upon it, Pearl.” 

“ I hope not — I think not. We are both wiser now than we used 
to be, and — he knows how much I like him.” 

“Yet you don’t care whether he is there to-night or not?” 

Again the light in Pearl’s eyes was mysterious and misleading. 

“ I am not going to sing to him," she answered, gayly, and her 
aunt let her go then without further questioning. 

By-and-by she came down, dressed with unusual care and ele- 
gance, and looking even in the unflattering yellow gaslight far young- 
er than she really was. 

“ Pearl, you are the strangest creature !” exclaimed Mrs. Fursden, 
with a sort of tender petulance. “ There’s no knowing where to 
have you. On a day when I should have expected you to be 
18 


274 


THE PRICE OF A PEARL 


weary and depressed, you look as young and brilliant as you did at 
eighteen, and much more innocent.” 

“I feel innocent to-night;” and, regardless of her evening finery, 
Pearl knelt down in a sudden impulse of affection before her aunt, 
and covered her face with kisses. “I feel so good and gentle, just 
as I used to long ago, after you had been singing sacred music.” 

Mrs. Fursden’s hand rested lovingly on the fair head so near her 
own. 

“ Don’t be too good and too gentle to poor Lord Glendown !” she 
said, in a tone of tender admonition. 

“Just now,” replied Pearl, laughing, “you said I was heartless. 
Come ! wish me success, Aunt Emily, with my halt and maimed 
and blind audience. Who knows but what this night may be a 
turning-point in my fortunes?” 

“ Who knows, indeed ? At all events, you have my blessing, 
child, and don’t, if you can help it — ” 

But at this point Pearl put her fingers in her ears, and declared 
stoutly that she was not going to listen to any more “ don’ts.” She 
was gone a few moments later, well wrapped up against the damp 
and chillness, and turning round at the door to nod and smile a 
bright farewell to her aunt. 

Afterwards, when the old lady looked back upon that night, she 
remembered that it was the last time she ever saw gladness in 
Pearl’s face, or heard it in the ring of her voice ; and the cloaked 
and hooded figure became a ghostly visiou, the memory of which 
contracted her heart with an unmeaning futile sorrow, and dimmed 
her eyes with bitter, scorching tears. 

It was still raining when Pearl reached the hospital — a fine, cold 
rain that seemed to be charged with ice, and caused her cabman to 
smite himself vigorously across his chest and blow hard upon his 
nipped fingers during the few moments before the outer door was 
opened. 

“ I’m afraid we shall have snow,” said Pearl, shudderingly, as she 
prepared to alight on the wet pavement. 

The cabby assented with a surly grunt. This was not the sort of 
weather to improve a man’s temper, after ten hours’ hard work on 
insufficient nourishment. 

“You’ll be sure to come back for me at ten o’clock?” 

He first glanced at the silver she had dropped into his hand, and 
then nodded silently. 


THE OTHER WOMAN 


275 


She was a lady, he decided in his own mind, and he would not 
disappoint her. But no human being at that moment could have 
foreseen that long before midnight the streets of London would be 
literally impassable. 

Once inside the door of St. Basil’s Hospital, Pearl forgot all such 
minor discomforts as cold and damp. It was a beautiful building, 
well planned for the comfort of its inmates, pleasantly warm and 
brilliantly lighted. 

She was received by one of the nurses, a pretty, brown-haired, 
hazel-eyed woman, whose close-fitting dark-blue gown and daintily- 
frilled white cap and collar did no violence to her natural charms, 
but rather set them off than otherwise. 

Pearl remembered the grim and forbidding-looking spinster sent 
down by the Lord Chancellor to Fingall to take charge of her un- 
fortunate godmother, and she could not but be struck by the con- 
trast between the two women. 

It was, perhaps, to be accounted for on religious grounds, and she 
glanced again at her new acquaintance in search of some distin- 
guishing cross or badge indicative of a supposed sisterhood. But 
no such ecclesiastical token appeared on the nurse’s slim, agile figure ; 
only a neat pincushion, a pair of scissors, and one or two other ac- 
cessories of her professional calling, which struck Pearl as eminently 
sensible if also purely secular. 

“ Then — are you not Sisters of Mercy in this hospital ?” she 
asked, presently, emboldened by the pleasant smile and winning 
manner of this — to her — altogether new specimen of feminine hu- 
manity. 

“ Oh, dear, no. We are nurses, and we don’t call ourselves any- 
thing else. I am Nurse Lois, and this is our matron, Miss Sullivan,” 
stopping for a moment to exchange a few words with an older but 
not less attractive-looking woman. 

“This is the lady Lord Glendown told us about, you remember. 
He said we were to take particular care of you, Miss Wetherall, so 
I hope you will give a good account of us when you see him again.” 

“Then he won’t be here to-night?” Pearl said, annoyed to feel 
herself coloring under the arch glance that accompanied these last 
words. Both women, as she could not help feeling, were regarding 
her with secret curiosity. 

“Didu’t you know?” asked the younger, surprised at this ques- 
tion. “He has gone abroad — to the Riviera, I believe — and won’t 
be back till spring.” 


276 


THE PRICE OF A PEARL 


“ No, I didn’t know. I hardly ever see him.” 

But though Pearl spoke carelessly, she was both hurt and disap- 
pointed. He might at least have told her he was going, instead of 
leaving her to hear of his movements from a perfect stranger! 

Alas! it would have been well for her peace of mind on that fate- 
ful New-year’s Eve if nothing more serious had disturbed it than 
just a slight sting to her feminine self-love. 

She forgot it almost immediately in her first amazed sensation at 
the sight of her audience. It was one the like of which she had 
never faced before. “Halt and maimed and blind” she had called 
them, with the glibness of one who speaks from hearsay. 

But she had never pictured to herself such a scene as that which 
met her eyes to-night, and the word “ patient ” acquired for her 
thenceforward a new meaning. Of the many faces upturned to hers 
as she appeared before them, disease had made some frightful to 
look upon, while others it had stamped with a strange hall-mark of 
refinement and ethereal beauty, as if annihilating by its stern touch 
all fictitious class differences, such as obtain under ordinary condi- 
tions of social existence. 

Pearl looked at them with awestruck eyes, and wondered how she 
had ever dared to breathe a murmur against Heaven when there was 
in the world such real and tangible suffering as this. 

And then her thoughts flew to one who was indeed never very 
far from them at any time, and she gazed around the lofty room 
in a sort of blissful pain at the remembrance that, within its 
walls, Hector had lived and worked, and perhaps had dreamed of 
her. 

Never had any human being heard Pearl sing as she sang to-night. 
Her voice vibrated with a passionate emotion, born partly of sym- 
pathy with those who were listening to her, and partly of that latent 
romance which, within the last few days, had started into such 
active vitality as to transform her whole being. 

In singing to Hector’s patients — for surely some at least among 
them had had experience of his skilful ministrations — she felt that 
she was singing to Hector himself; and their heartfelt applause 
which, at one time, might only have flattered her artistic vanity, 
filled her eyes now with tears of tender sentiment, in which com- 
punction and hope both played their part. 

The matron, a warm-hearted, impulsive Irishwoman, who looked 
almost too young at first sight for the responsible post intrusted to 
her, came forward at the close of the entertainment, and in the name 


THE OTHER WOMAN 


277 


of the assembled patients thanked her heartily for the great pleasure 
she had given them. 

“And, indeed, to ourselves also, Miss Wetherall. It was so good 
of you to let us have that encore. I seem to know the air, though 
I can’t put a name to it.” 

“It is the one Dr. Armytage was always whistling,” said Nurse 
Lois, with a little nervous laugh, before Pearl could answer the 
question. 

“Oh! then no wonder the tune was so familiar to me! Dr. Ar- 
mytage was one of our house-surgeons,” explained the matron, show- 
ing her white teeth in a smile that seemed to have some mischiev- 
ous significance in it, and glancing rather pointedly at the same time 
at her pretty subordinate. “ Nurse Lois can tell you all about Aim,” 
she added, slyly. 

Pearl looked on in quiet amusement at this little by-play. That 
it should in any way concern herself was the last idea to occur to 
her. 

She perceived that the younger woman looked slightly embar- 
rassed by the raillery of the matron, and was evidently in no hurry 
to furnish the biography of that Dr. Armytage whose name she had 
herself so rashly brought forward, with true feminine inconsequence. 
Pearl, therefore, gave a different turn to the conversation by asking 
for her cab, which, as the clock indicated, was already a quarter of 
an hour overdue. 

Nurse Lois hastened on this errand to the outer hall, but presently 
returned with somewhat disquieting tidings. No cab was in sight, 
nor apparently within hearing, as another of the performers had been 
whistling in vain for the last ten minutes. Moreover, the rain was 
freezing as it fell, the streets were like glass, and it was doubtful 
whether any driver in his sober senses would undertake a fare. 

“ But what shall I do ?” exclaimed Pearl, greatly dismayed at this 
intelligence. “ I must get home somehow. My aunt will be fright- 
ened to death if I don’t turn up before midnight, and the man prom- 
ised to come back. I’ve had him before, and he has never failed me 
yet.” 

“Perhaps,” suggested Nurse Lois, “his horse may have failed 
him. I assure you, Miss Wetherall, the streets are all but impassa- 
ble. I expect we shall be kept up all night with casualties.” 

“But he would let me know if he couldn’t drive me. I am sure 
he would. He knows I would make it worth his while.” 

Pearl looked about her in helpless perplexity. The great hall, so 


278 


THE PRICE OF A PEARL 


full a few moments before, was now almost deserted, and the other 
performers — all strangers to her — had drawn together in a little 
group apart, from which she felt herself to be tacitly excluded. 

“ You don’t know any of them ?” questioned Nurse Lois. 

Pearl shook her head. She had the sensation — not unfamiliar to 
her on these occasions — of being, after all, no better than a speckled 
bird. 

Between her and the ordinary professional there was apparently 
nothing in common, and she herself was no longer an ordinary ama- 
teur. Possibly Nurse Lois may have divined the state of things, for 
her manner was full of kindly consideration as she proceeded to lead 
the way to the matron’s own sitting-room. 

“I think you had better sit here, if you don’t mind, while I go 
and see what can be done. Miss Sullivan will be sure to think of 
something. This is her sanctum. Your friend, Lord Glendown, 
knows it very well.” 

To Pearl, however, it mattered much less that Lord Glendown 
should know the room than that the room should once have known 
the presence of Hector MacAdam. Almost it seemed to meet her 
at the door and bid her welcome, and she looked around her with a 
tender interest that could hardly be concealed. 

“ I’ll leave you, if you don’t object,” said Nurse Lois — “ in fact, I had 
better say good-night, as I shall have to go on duty almost directly.” 

“Do you mean to say you are going to sit up all night?” said 
Pearl, so genuinely shocked at the idea that the other could not 
help laughing. 

“That’s not a very great hardship. I had a good sleep this 
afternoon.” 

“ But all night — it seems dreadful !” 

“ Not if you’re used to it. Good-night, Miss Wetherall. It has 
been a real pleasure to hear you sing. I hope we may meet again 
some day.” 

Pearl echoed the wish very heartily. She liked this bright, win- 
some creature, with her honest eyes and sunny smile, and kind, help- 
ful ways, and she was aware that the feeling was mutual. 

They parted cordially — almost warmly, no shadow of instinctive 
aversion or mistrust falling between them, to warn each that the 
other was her rival — might turn to be her enemy. Alas ! by what 
strange fatality was it that Bertie, in his forecast of that evening’s 
entertainment, forgot altogether the very existence of “ the other 
woman ” ? 


CHAPTER IX 


SLIPPERY GROUND 

“You can no more hurry Destiny than you can delay her. One is always in 
plenty of time, dawdle as one may, for the inevitable. That is a train one is 
perfectly safe to catch.” 

Pearl remained for some little time alone in the cosey snuggery 
where Nurse Lois had left her. It was a brightly-furnished habitable 
room, full of all those feminine knick-knacks, framed photographs, 
and embroidered chair-backs which so faithfully reflect the passing 
fashion in upholstery — a very desirable refuge, in short, for a busy 
woman from the cares and fatigues of office ; and, if one might 
judge by the number of the photographs disposed in every direction 
about the room, Miss Sullivan was evidently rich in friends, or, at 
least, in friendly acquaintances. 

Pearl examined these attentively, and was about further to explore 
the contents of a large and handsome album, lying in solitary state 
upon a small, carved table, when the matron herself made her ap- 
pearance, full of apologies at having been obliged to remain away 
so long. 

She had not, however, as she explained, been unmindful of her 
guest’s quandary. A messenger had already been despatched in 
search of a cab, and if this quest should prove fruitless, he was both 
able and willing to escort Miss Wetherall on foot to the nearest 
underground railway station, and so to her own home. 

“But ye’d better stop here,” added the hospitable Irishwoman, 
“ and let me send a message to your aunt.” 

“ Thank you very much indeed,” replied Pearl, gratefully, “ but I 
must get home, whatever happens. The others have gone, I suppose, 
by this time ?” 

Miss Sullivan’s merry blue eyes twinkled rather wickedly. 

“ I got no orders about the others,” said she, with a grave shake 
of the head which contradicted her laughing eyes, “ but I was par- 
ticularly desired to take care of Miss Wetherall — I suppose I needn’t 
say by whom ?” 


280 


THE PRICE OF A PEARL 


“By a very kind friend,” Pearl answered, as composedly as was 
possible under these trying conditions. 

“ He’s a very good friend to us, I can tell ye,” continued the ma- 
tron, in her pleasant Hibernian accents, which, together with her 
warm, expansive manner and benevolent expression, made Pearl feel 
thoroughly at home with her, “but we don’t see as much of him as 
we used at one time.” 

“ Since his brother died, I suppose ?” suggested Pearl. 

“ No, but since his friend left us. Lord Glendown used to be in 
and out at all hours when he was here.” 

“ You mean — Mr. MacAdam ?” 

It was the first time for more than five years that she had taken 
that name on her lips, and the very sound of it in her own ears 
shook her almost to trembling. 

“ Mr. MacAdam ?” repeated the matron, in a tone of evident be- 
wilderment. “ Who is he ?” 

It was Pearl’s turn to look astonished at this query, and she was 
conscious of a sudden sickening sense of disappointment. Was it 
all a mistake, then — her belief that this hospital had been the field 
of Hector’s medical training? Surely, Bertie himself had given 
her to understand as much, and on that understanding had induced 
her to act. At the mere suspicion that she had been misled, she felt 
her throat constricted by a sense of impotent displeasure. 

“ Lord Glendown’s friend,” she answered, rather coldly, “ who 
studied here, I believe, or — something.” 

What did she know about him, after all ? And yet five minutes 
ago how sure she had felt, and oh, how tender ! 

“Perhaps,” hazarded the matron, “you mean Dr. Armytage? He 
was one of our house-surgeons last year. I have certainly never 
heard the name of MacAdam since I came to this hospital, and that 
is more than seven years ago.” 

“ I suppose I have made a mistake,” said Pearl, in a tone of care- 
fully assumed indifference of the sort that is as hard to keep up as 
a strained, unnatural attitude to the body. “ I thought that Lord 
Glendown said something — about a friend of his having worked at 
St. Basil’s.” 

“ But Dr. Armytage is his friend — a very dear friend — and Lord 
Glendown was instrumental, I believe, in getting him his present 
berth. You’ve only mistaken the name, I’m quite sure.” 

Pearl said nothing, but her face was still expressive of a certain 
bored incredulity which belied her previous gentleness of manner, 


SLIPPERY GROUND 


281 


and brought out, as if under the influence of some powerful acid, 
various lines and shadows, not discernible earlier in the evening. 

It had not yet dawned upon her consciousness that, in leaving be- 
hind him his old life, Hector had dropped likewise the old name 
under which she had once known him. Having kept him silently 
enshrined in her remorseful heart all these years past as Hector Mac- 
Adam, she could not now identify him at a moment’s notice with 
Dr. Armytage. Why should she? The name itself said nothing to 
her. She had no association with it. 

“ I am sure we mean the same person,” persisted Miss Sullivan, 
with the cheeriness of one who was prepared to elucidate any re- 
maining mystery in the matter. “It is so unlikely, you know, that 
Lord Glendown would have two medical friends, and this Dr. Armi- 
tage — oh, to be sure, I have his photo in the very book you have on 
your lap. I can show it to you, if you like.” 

By this time poor Pearl’s heart seemed to be throbbing fiercely 
in her throat, and the leisurely movements of the matron as she pro- 
ceeded to unclasp the heavy album and glance through its illumi- 
nated pages scarcely acted as an anodyne on the girl’s already fevered 
nerves. 

Miss Sullivan, sublimely ignorant of the volcanic nature of her 
guest’s sensations, continued to stroll, as it were, through the bulky 
volume, pausing every now and then at some particular photo, and 
giving a biographical notice of the individual that it portrayed. 

If Pearl betrayed no impatience, either by sign or gesture, during 
those few torturing minutes, it was only because the main lesson of 
her life during the last five years had been that of rigid self-control. 

“There’s Lord Glendown himself — a pleasing one, I think. It 
has his best expression, but no doubt you have it yourself ?” 

“ No,” Pearl admitted, quietly, “ I don’t possess any photo of 
Lord Glendown.” 

“Ah, well, my dear, he’s probably saving up the original for yon. 
Now where — Oh, here we are! This is his friend. H. Armytage — 
written by himself, you see. I made him sign it the night before 
he left England.” 

The throbbing heart gave a wild leap, and Pearl bent her head 
instinctively lest some unconscious movement of recognition should 
unmask her breathless eagerness. 

Yes: it was the face she remembered so faithfully. A little 
older-looking, perhaps, a little squarer of jaw, a little less boyish in 
expression ; but otherwise strangely unaltered— at least, in the eyes 


282 


THE PRICE OF A PEARL 


which had so long hungered in vain for even such a poor shadowy 
view of it as this. 

“ I should think it was a good photo,” she remarked, coolly, as 
soon as she could trust her voice. 

“ But you see the name is Annytage, not MacAdam.” 

“ Yes, I see. I was mistaken.” 

“ And you recognize his vis-a-vis ?” 

Pearl looked at the opposite page, and saw that it was occupied 
by a three-quarter length of Nurse Lois. 

She studied it in silence for some moments, in which she felt her- 
self grow perfectly cool all over, as if an icy hand had been laid on 
her by the Angel of Death himself. 

The scene in the great hall after the concert recurred to her mem- 
ory with agonizing distinctness. She heard again the nurse’s little 
self-conscious laugh, the matron’s good-humored chaff and unan- 
swered challenge. They had amused her then. Now the mental 
echo of them almost deafened her. 

She could have screamed aloud as she sat there on the matron’s 
sofa, with the heavy album on her lap, gazing fixedly at those two 
faces, which seemed to look at each other rather than at her. 

“They make a charming couple, don’t they?” said Miss Sullivan’s 
cheerful voice beside her. 

It sounded far away and unreal in Pearl’s ears, as though she 
heard it in a deathly swoon. 

“Are they engaged?” she asked, carelessly, and her own voice 
seemed to her no whit less unfamiliar. 

“ Ah, that’s more than I can tell you ; but, if they’re not now, I 
think they will be, and I’ve put their shadows together as you see. 
He came to say good-bye to her before he went away. I thought my 
self he wanted to say something else, but she didn’t tell me if he did.” 

A timely knock at the door released Pearl from the necessity of 
framing a reply to this speech. 

She sat on, cold and motionless, with the book open on her lap, 
while the matron went to the door, and began a low-toned colloquy 
with a man who stood outside. 

“ Fool !” Pearl whispered to herself, with lips so parched that they 
could hardly say the word. It was caught up by the toy travelling- 
clock on the mantel-piece, which struck “ fool ” sharply and swiftly 
eleven times, and then went on ticking in sublime indifference. Out- 
side some church clock seemed to pelt her with the same scornful 
epithet, “Fooll Fooll Fooll” 


SLIPPERY GROUND 


283 


And Pearl’s stricken heart could not gainsay the truth of it. Who 
else but a fool, a vain and fatuous fool, would have overlooked the 
possibility of that with which she had just been confronted as an all 
but established fact { 

And it was all quite natural and quite reasonable. She had given 
him back bis word fiv^e years ago. Why should she have expected 
him to keep it for her, when she had not thought it worth while to 
keep it for herself? Na\% she had been content to expect nothing 
and hope nothing, and only live upon her blessed memories until 
Bertie had, as it were, planted himself across her path, and bade her 
look on to a future colored by her past. 

Oh, great Heaven ! why had he not left her alone ? Her dead 
were buried, her ghost was laid. She had got leave to work in a 
world where she had ceased to wish to play. Why had he dragged 
her here against her first unconscious instinct, and mocked her with 
a shadowy hope that turned out to be the wildest folly? 

The doctor and the nurse. Oh yes, it was quite right and sensi- 
ble ! She had heard of the combination before now. That was 
why women became nurses — so people were kind enough to say — 
in order that they might catch the doctors as eligible life-partners. 

Miss Sullivan unconsciously broke in upon these bitter self-com- 
munings. 

“ My dear, I am so distressed,” she exclaimed, anxiously. “ Not 
a cab to be had for love or money, and my man here says it really 
is not fit for a lady to go on foot even such a little way as to the 
station. Can’t I persuade you to give up the idea and stay with us?” 

“ I am very sure - footed,” Pearl answered, with a wan, forced 
smile. 

It seemed to matter to her so little at that moment what might 
happen in the way of trifling casualties, such as broken limbs or dis- 
located joints. 

She stood up as she spoke, and the light from a hanging lamp 
overhead fell full upon her white, drawn face, revealing the black 
hollows under her tired eyes and the strained lines about the nose 
and mouth. 

Miss Sullivan exclaimed aloud at the sight. 

“You look worn out!” she cried, compassionately, “and chilled 
to death beforehand. My dear Miss Wetherall, Lord Glendown 
would never forgive me if I let you leave the house to-night.” 

“ Lord Glendown will not hear of it from me,” replied Pearl, with 
the utmost coolness. She felt strung up now to play any part re- 


284 


THE PRICE OF A PEARL 


quired of her before the longed-for moment came when she might 
shut her door and draw its bolts, and sob her heart out on her pil- 
low. No persuasions could avail to make her change her mind. 
She was well wrapped up; she had overshoes. Oh, yes! her aunt 
had seen to all that, and if the porter would only escort her to her 
own door she would pay him handsomely. 

Miss Sullivan let her go at last, with a foreboding shake of the head. 

“If you catch your death of cold, or break a leg or arm, don’t 
say it was our fault, for we’d have kept you gladly.” 

“ I shall only have myself to blame,” Pearl answered, with an 
unmirthful laugh. 

In her own mind she was saying, bitterly, “ I have only myself to 
blame.” 

It would have been hard to recognize her in the cloaked and hood- 
ed figure which emerged a few moments later from the hospital, lean- 
ing on the arm of her hired companion. The cold was piercing, and 
the utmost caution was necessary in walking, inasmuch as the pave- 
ments were already coated with ice half an inch thick, and smooth 
and slippery as glass. 

Before she reached the metropolitan station, scarcely more than 
two hundred yards distant, Pearl was almost benumbed with cold, 
and her frozen fingers could hardly retain their hold upon the por- 
ter’s arm. 

“There’ll be a-many broken limbs before mornin’, both of hosses 
and men,” he observed, sapiently. “ Take care, miss, you was nearly 
over then.” Very nearly, indeed, as her jarred muscles bore painful 
witness, and for a minute her courage was ready to fail at the pros- 
pect of going on with so perilous an expedition. 

But the friendly red lantern of the station was in sight ; the walk 
at the other end was scarcely longer than the one she had just taken 
by the aid of the porter’s stalwart arm, and retreat would therefore 
be useless. 

Slowly and painfully the remaining steps were taken, and she 
found herself at last in the welcome shelter of the booking-office. 

But here also delay and difficulty seemed destined to dog her slip- 
pery way. There was a dense crowd of passengers. It was hard 
work even to get the tickets, harder still to find places when the 
train steamed into the station, every carriage of every class appar- 
ently crammed as full as it would hold, and the seats of such as 
alighted being snapped up at once by those who were fortunate 
enough to be able to jostle aside their less nimble fellows. 


SLIPPERY GROUND 


285 


In utter despair and blind confusion poor Pearl hurried up and 
down the platform, looking vainly for a vacant place. She had lost 
sight of her escort in the first rush towards the advancing train, and 
soon found that here as elsewhere the weakest were apt to be shoul- 
dered to the wall. Fortunately, however, the guard came to her 
assistance, and just as the long row of carriages had been set in mo- 
tion she felt herself half pushed, half lifted into a first-class com- 
partment already filled nearly to overflowing by about half a score 
of male passengers. 

She stood for one moment dazed and breathless, and then some 
one touched her gently on the shoulder. 

“Allow me,” he said, with grave courtesy, and adroitly placed 
her in his own corner seat before she had time to realize his inten- 
tion of vacating it. 

She murmured her thanks, but apparently he was not solicitous 
about receiving them, and the next moment he was standing bolt- 
upright against the carriage door, looking past her with cold un- 
seeing eyes, as if the woman whom he had just befriended had no 
existence for him, save as a representative member of a sex which he 
evidently pitied more than he liked or admired. 

It was the sure way to make the woman look at him, and this 
woman, though she had the sadness of death in her heart, could yet 
be surprised and perhaps even faintly displeased at an indifference 
which ignored her personality, and almost made her feel herself in- 
visible. A few seconds more, however, and she had shrunk back 
into her corner with an unspoken prayer that the man might con- 
tinue to overlook her for the remainder of her short journey. 

Too well she remembered the rigid outline of that clean-cut pro- 
file, with the heavy iron-gray mustache that never fully veiled the 
inflexible expression of the unsmiling mouth. It was with a sensa- 
tion bordering closely on sheer physical terror that Pearl recognized 
her former suitor, Bartholomew Lewis. 


CHAPTER X 


KISMET ! 

“ Will he love roe twice with a love that is vain ? 

Will he kill the poor ghost yet again?” 

It was the first time that she had ever seen the man apart from 
herself and from his feeling for her, and the light in which he now 
stood revealed was so new and startling as to bewilder all precon- 
ceived ideas that she had ever formed respecting him. Whether 
from moral integrity, or from intellectual acumen, or from sheer 
doggedness of will she knew not, but consciously or unconsciously 
he seemed to draw to himself the respectful attention of nearly 
every man in the carriage. 

From the drift of the conversation which her abrupt entrance had 
only temporarily interrupted, she could make out that most of them 
were on their way back from some public meeting in the East-End, 
where Mr. Lewis had evidently taken a leading part in the pro- 
ceedings. These were still the subject of interested discussions, 
remarks were exchanged, comments dropped, questions put, and 
glancing furtively around at the various faces, Pearl saw that with 
scarcely one exception they were all directed more or less deferen- 
tially towards the grave, taciturn individual whom she had only had 
to do with in the capacity of a rejected lover. 

His own absolute unconsciousness of her immediate vicinity did 
not by any means tend to slacken the pace of her galloping pulses, 
and the suppressed excitement which he might once have felt at 
sight of her was now by some strange irony of fate transferred to 
herself at sight of him. She dreaded recognition indeed, and hon- 
estly avoided notice, but in all her life she had never felt so small 
in her own eyes as when his eyes persistently refused to rest upon her. 

For one thing, however, she had not bargained, and that was his 
remarkable quickness of hearing, which presently came to the aid 
of his defective vision, and unmasked Pearl’s identity by a curiously 
unforeseen accident. 


KISMET ! 


287 


At South Kensington one or two of the passengers alighted, and 
Mr. Lewis dropped quietly into the corner facing that which he had 
relinquished in Pearl’s favor. His short sight, no less than her 
own mummylike wrappings, still preserved her incognito, and she 
might ultimately have effected her escape unrecognized if chance or 
providence had not at that moment interposed in the person of one 
of the company’s inspectors, who suddenly presented himself and his 
lantern at the door of the carriage and made a summary demand for 
tickets. 

Pearl’s was not forthcoming, her hired escort having retained 
possession of it, and she had entered upon a hurried explanation to 
this effect when the porter himself turned up to bear witness to her 
integrity. 

But inasmuch as the ticket produced by him was second-class, 
and Pearl was clearly travelling in a first-class carriage, the impatient 
official refused to hear any further explanation, adding wrathfully 
that there had been far too many of these cases lately, and that the 
company had determined to put a stop to them. Would the lady 
kindly give him her name and address? 

“ There is no necessity,” said Mr. Lewis, with a quiet wave of the 
hand which indicated both authority and power. “ You know my 
name and my address?” 

The man touched his cap respectfully and withdrew. Mr. Lewis 
pulled up the window in ominous silence, folded his arms, and leaned 
back in his corner without a look or glance at Pearl. But she had 
felt his eyes upon her a few moments before, and she remembered 
that they saw with relentless distinctness such things as came within 
their limited focus. He might not choose to recognize her, but that 
he knew her she was nearly certain, and her position became mo- 
mently more intolerable. 

At the next station he leaned forward and laid a tentative hand on 
the window-strap. 

“ Do you get out here ?” he asked, briefly. 

She shook her head. He inclined his, and again leaned back in 
his corner. But this time his gold-rimmed spectacles were brought 
to bear on her with the force of a burning-glass, and she almost 
writhed under the calm, persistent scrutiny which from strange eyes 
would have been positive insult. 

At Earl’s Court she essayed to open the door, but he forestalled 
her, got out himself, helped her out, and then, lifting his hat, said 
quietly : 


288 


THE PRICE OF A PEARL 


“ Miss Merry weather!” 

“ I didn’t think you knew me,” faltered Pearl, putting out a 
trembling hand, and catching her breath sharply, as his fingers closed 
on hers with a convulsive clasp that nearly crushed them. 

“ I heard you speak,” he said, abruptly, and his eyes rested on her 
face with a look of famine-hunger in them that almost made her 
shudder. 

There was a moment’s painful silence, and then she drew back as 
if to let him pass. He shook his head ; a curious smile hovered 
around his fast-closed lips that seemed to question her ability to give 
him his dismissal so soon or so easily. 

“I am going to see you home, Miss Merry weather.” 

“There is some one with me. I am not by myself, Mr. Lewis.” 

Her escort made his appearance at that moment, and respectfully 
saluted Mr. Lewis, whom he appeared to recognize as a personage of 
no inconsiderable importance. 

“How do 1 know your face?” said the banker, with one of Jiis 
swift, peering glances. “Porter at St. Basil’s? Oh, of course. I 
have seen you there quite lately. Well, you needn’t come any farther 
now. Kindly wait a moment, while I attend to this lady.” 

He turned to Pearl as he spoke, drew her arm within his own, and 
led her straight up-stairs to the deserted waiting-room. 

She began an alarmed remonstrance as he pulled forward one of 
the stiff leather-bound chairs, and placed it within range of the dull 
coke fire. 

“ Mr. Lewis, I must really go home.” 

“ You must get warm first ; you are chilled to the bone now. And 
you must give me the privilege of an old acquaintance, and let me 
take care of you. Apparently there’s no one else to do it, or I should 
hardly find you going about at midnight under the nominal pro- 
tection of a hospital porter.” 

“It was an accident,” she began, hurriedly. “You mustn’t sup- 
pose that I — ” 

“ I suppose nothing,” he interrupted, with a sudden kindling of his 
stern face, which betokened powerful emotion of some sort or other; 
“ but I find you to all intents and purposes alone on the under- 
ground railway in the dead of night, and I ask myself what your 
friends are about to allow it.” 

“ I haven’t — many friends.” 

Her under lip began to quiver painfully. He gnawed his own, 
and clinched his palms at the sight. 


KISMET ! 


289 


“ Sit down,” he said, huskily, “ and wait for me. I shall not be 
long. Yon promise to stay ? You won’t try to go away ?” 

Iler eyes as she looked up at him were unnaturally bright and big 
with tears. They almost blinded her, and she could not see that he 
was trembling in every nerve and shaking like an aspen leaf. 

“ You have taken me prisoner, Mr. Lewis,” with a little faint 
smile, even more pathetic than her still unshed tears. 

“You are on parole,” he answered, abruptly, and turned away, 
but not before he had seen her cover her face with her hands, and 
heard her sobbing. 

The city clocks struck midnight. 

The old year was dead, and in a flood of frozen rain, cold and 
heavy even as the tears that flowed from poor Pearl’s eyes, the new 
year began its course. Five short hours since she had left home, 
but the experience she had lived through during that time made it 
seem more like five years. 

Nay, many women have lived twice ten years without ever tasting 
of those vivid emotions of love and tenderness and hope and mis- 
giving, disappointment, jealousy, pride, and shame which she had 
felt to-night in all their fulness and all their bitterness too. 

And now, what was the new year bringing her? The old year 
had slain her love. What was the shadow that already seemed to 
project itself before her on her untried path? A bond that would 
mean bondage ! A master who would rule her life, and command 
her obedience, and possess — herself. 

She did not consciously think these thoughts, but she foresaw, as 
only a woman can or ever does, the end from the beginning. Once 
she might have kept this man out of her life. When his love was 
younger and less masterful, it had been hard enough to deny it. 
But still, upheld by the only real affection her heart had ever known, 
she had kept it at bay, though conscious all the while that her only 
safety lay in flight. Her very dread of meeting Mr. Lewis bore wit- 
ness to his ascendency over her. 

She knew that he could make her be his wife, whether she would 
or not, if fate ever threw her in his way again. She knew to-night, 
though she could not bring herself to face the knowledge, that he 
would marry her. It was only a question of time, but the end was 
sure. The man whom she loved had forgotten her. The man whom 
she feared remembered her always, and his passion — only dormant, 
never dead — had sprung into instant activity at the mere sound of 
her voice. She heard his step approaching, and she knew it be- 
19 


290 


THE PRICE OF A PEARL 


longed to her master who was coming to “ lord it over her.” A mo- 
ment later he came, bringing with him a basin of steaming soup 
which he set before her on the round table. 

“You are to drink this before I take you home,” he said, in his 
measured, level voice. But she remembered the old inflexible ring 
in it, and feared to disobey him. 

He stood by, and watched her fixedly as she swallowed each 
mouthful; and he saw that her “drink was mingled with weeping.” 
She had no power left to check her tears, and they stole down si- 
lently and unobtrusively, but not unperceived by him. 

“ Is the sight of me so painful to you,” he said, at last, despond- 
ently, “ that you cry like this ?” 

“ No, no,” sobbed Pearl. “ It’s not anything of that sort. I — 
I don’t know what’s the matter with me. Please — please don’t take 
any notice of me.” 

He took her at her word, and turned away with a stifled sigh. A 
man who had known more of women would have been wiser, and 
would have managed to convey to her, by some tender look or ca- 
ressing touch, the sympathy best left unexpressed in actual lip-lan- 
guage. But this man, though his heart was full to aching, feared so 
much as to take her by the hand. 

“ It was very good of you,” she said, after a little while, “ to have 
brought me this, Mr. Lewis.” 

Her voice was less unsteady. She was, at least, stronger in body, 
if she was not calmer in mind. 

One of Bartholomew’s shadowy smiles flitted across his face as he 
answered, soberly : 

“Is the soup good, Miss Merry weather ? That’s more to the pur- 
pose.” 

“ Yes, thank you. I feel better now.” 

“ I should like to see you look better ; but I suppose that’s hardly 
to be expected.” 

“ I am very tired. I shall be all right to-morrow.” 

“ Or to-day,” he suggested, rather meaningly. “ Do you know 
that the old year is dead ?” 

She said nothing, but the sadness of death was in her eyes as she 
lifted them for one moment to his. 

“ It is New-year’s Day. What do people say to each other when 
they meet on New-year’s Day ?” 

Her answer almost staggered him, so eloquent was it of a bitter- 
ness which he felt himself powerless to cure. 


KISMET ! 


291 

“ They wish each other what no one ever has or ever will have in 
this world.” 

He looted at her in plained surprise. 

“At least it is a kindly custom. You won’t forbid me to wish 
you a happy New Year?” 

“ Thank you,” said Pearl, drearily. “ The same to you. Will you 
help me on, please, with these?” putting out her hand as she spoke 
for some of the many wraps which the heated atmosphere of the 
dingy little room had obliged her to throw off. 

He gathered them up and helped her to put them on, not unskil- 
fully, indeed, but with characteristically grave preoccupation that 
overlooked a chance which most men under similar circumstances 
would have snapped at greedily. 

Surely to no one but himself would the spoken word have out- 
weighed in significance the silent gesture. All the time that, he was 
cloaking her he was absorbed in the thought of what he wanted to 
say, forgetful — or, worse still, unconscious — of the fact that she 
might so easily have been made to understand it all without one ut- 
tered syllable from him. God help the man who does his wooing 
after this sort ! He may win after a doubtful fashion, but his vic- 
tory will prove but a very barren conquest, and the innermost citadel 
will never own him for its sovereign. 

And so it befell that when he found words at last for his burning 
thoughts they sounded cold and even measured in the ears of Pearl. 

“ Fate has been kinder to me to-night than you have, Miss Merry- 
weather.” 

“ Are you sure ?” she answered, still drearily. 

“ You would have taken advantage of my infirmity ?” touching his 
glasses, and looking at her with the old wistfulness in his weak eyes 
which had once moved her to a sort of uneasy compassion. But to- 
night she felt that compassion was as dead within her breast as love 
itself. She was not sorry, only ill at ease, and burdened by an old 
outstanding debt of obligation. 

Her embarrassed silence gave consent to what he said, and he went 
on, after a moment : 

“ Was that kind or generous ?” 

“ I didn’t think you remembered me,” she murmured, feebly, fall- 
ing back on her former excuse, though she knew, and he knew, and 
she knew that he knew it was a pitifully lame one. 

“ Remember you !” he repeated, with a short, dry laugh. “ I have 
never forgotten you. This day I looked for your name in the paper. 


292 


THE PRICE OF A PEARL 


I have looked for it every day since last I saw your face, and thanked 
God because I didn’t find it. Well, now I have found yourself, and 
that is better. Come, let me take you to your home, Pearl. To- 
morrow we will do our talking.” 

He led her out as he had led her in, with an air of quiet owner- 
ship that she had no spirit to resent, although it irked her. 

Nothing seemed to matter very much now, since Hector had for- 
gotten her. She felt herself hurried by relentless fate towards a 
coast that meant the shipwreck of all happiness. But since her 
bark was dismantled and her cargo swamped, what did it signify ? 
The empty hulk could only serve for drift-wood, and if one should 
indeed possess himself of that poor salvage — why, so much the worse 
for him ! 


Hiatt HID 


CHAPTER I 

MUTUAL ENLIGHTENMENT 

“ Does a man tear out his heart and make fritters thereof over a slow fire 
for aught other than a woman ? Do not laugh, friend of mine, for your time 
will also be.” 

“Well, Johnny, I congratulate you! Zero three times running 
with such stakes as yours must burn a nice little hole, I should think, 
in the paternal pocket. How do you feel after it, eh ?” 

Johnny Watson evidently felt rather bad. Ilis foolish face was 
blanched with dismay, and Lord Glendown’s rallying speech did not 
tend exactly to restore the young man’s shattered confidence in his 
own fortune. 

“ How do ?” he said, very feebly. “ Didn’t know you were in these 
parts. When did you come ?” 

“ Before you did. I’ve been in here about a couple of hours.” 

“ Hope you’ve had better luck than I have.” 

“ Well, I haven’t tried mine. I saw you come in, and, if I had 
been the meddlesome ass some people think me, I should have 
dragged you out by the hair of your head. But I thought you were 
old enough, on the whole, to buy your own experience.” 

“ Look here, Glendown, do help me, there’s a good fellow. If 
I had even a couple of hundred — ” 

Glendown shook his head with a gently pitying smile. 

“ Haven’t so much in the world, my dear boy, as a couple of hun- 
dred. We’re in a bad way ourselves at home. I expect my father 
will have to take the poor peers’ allowance before very long.” 

“You mean that for wit, I suppose?” said Johnny, in a tone of 
languid satire. 

“You evidently take it for folly,” rejoined Glendown, pleasantly; 


294 


THE PRICE OF A PEARL 


“but, joking apart, Johnny, I never deliberately assist any one to 
commit suicide. I may not be able always to prevent a man from 
cutting his own throat, but at least I needn’t hand him the razor.” 

“ I believe I have just found out the proper system,” urged Johnny. 

“ Afraid not, dear boy. It’s the people who run this show that have 
got hold of the proper system, and it’s fellows like you who help to 
keep up these ripping gardens, and pay for all this jolly music. You 
don’t suppose it’s done for nothing, do you?” 

“ Look here, it’s all very well to talk like that, but there was a fel- 
low I met last week at Nice came away from this place with over five 
thousand. Fact, I assure you. And I was with him when he opened 
his account at my bankers’.” 

“ Well, I’m afraid you’ll soon have to close yours at this rate of 
doing business. What possessed your people to let you come over 
to Monte Carlo by yourself? I always took your mother fora sensi- 
ble woman.” 

“ I say, Glendown, I wish you wouldn’t go on chaffing a fellow 
when he’s been as hard hit as I am. I really am in the devil of a way 
just now, and it’s not all my own doing either. What’s going to be- 
come of me I don’t see, if I can’t get hold of a couple of thousand 
before next week.” 

“Just now,” observed Bertie, rather dryly, “you said a couple of 
hundred, but I suppose that was to be used as counters?” 

“ No one ever had such cursed ill-luck,” whimpered the future Lord 
Lowick, “and I’m let in for a fearful lot by — some one whose name 
I’m not at liberty to mention.” 

Bertie glanced at him very narrowly through half-closed eyelids, 
and perceived that the would-be rake was on the verge of crying like 
a first-form schoolboy. He presented to such eyes as now rested on 
him a very comical spectacle, owing to his having been as completely 
beggared for the moment of his stock of swagger as of his actual 
funds or his prospective credit. 

Nevertheless, Bertie, for all his quick sense of the ridiculous, or 
perhaps indeed because of it, was aware that tragedy is often closely 
associated in this world with comedy, and, if the wretched Johnny 
was an object of pardonable contempt, it was quite possible that he 
might also be a subject for judicious assistance. 

“ Come away !” — briefly, but not unkindly. “ I suppose you’ve 
had enough for one day?” 

And Johnny obediently crept out after him, like a whipped puppy 
with its tail between its legs. 


mutual enlightenment 


295 


“ Sit down,” further commanded Lord Glendown, as soon as they 
had reached the exquisite gardens, every flower and every shrub of 
which might be said to be watered with human tears, if not indeed 
by human blood. 

With becoming embarrassment Johnny sat down, having first care- 
fully pulled up the knees of his perfectly-fitting trousers. 

Bertie smiled to himself gently under the shelter of the old wide- 
awake which he had drawn down over his eyes to shade them from 
the burning March sun. He told himself that the case was not past 
curing, but he knew that the cure would be somewhat pill-like and 
unpalatable. 

“And who may the lady be, Johnny,” he asked, blandly, “who 
has managed to get you into what you call a devil of a way ?” 

Johnny looked half-sheepish and half-gratified at this searching 
query, and murmured something to the effect that Glendown was 
assuming a good deal. 

“Well, that is my way. I’ve acquired a vast amount of miscel- 
laneous knowledge in my thirty years by assuming more than I could 
assert. It is on the principle, I suppose, that ‘ to him that hath shall 
be given.’” 

“ I said nothing about any lady,” said Johnny, secretly anxious, 
however, to maintain that reputation of being a “ sad dawg ” which 
he had so laboriously, and, if the truth must be told, so fraudulently 
built up for himself during the past half-dozen years. 

“ No,” replied Bertie, in the serio-comic accents most natural to 
himself, and most puzzling to his hearers, “you would be too 
gallant, I know. Still, when a fellow is unmanned, distinctly un- 
manned, as you were just now in the salon , one may fairly suppose 
some woman is answerable for it, and if I’m to be of any use to 
you, Johnny, in this business, you’ll have to let me hear a few par- 
ticulars.” 

Johnny hesitated for some moments after this characteristic utter- 
ance on the part of a man whom many people were found to ridicule, 
but whom no one had ever yet been known to despise. And small as 
was the modicum of brains that Nature had bestowed, with her usual 
irony, on this worthless son of a successful father, he had yet the 
sense to feel himself rebuked, and looked more than a little uncom- 
fortable. There was accordingly a certain undercurrent of apology 
and exculpation in his somewhat halting reply. 

“ Well, look here, you know, of course you and people like you 
will make a fuss because of her being a married woman.” 


296 


THE PRICE OE A PEARL 


“ I don’t think it is worth making a fuss about,” remarked Bertie, 
so coolly that for a moment or two the other could only gaze at him 
in open-eyed astonishment at this unlooked-for reception of an 
avowal to which he himself attached such evident importance. 

Bertie then proceeded to drive his bolt home with a languid good- 
nature that refused to be either shocked or indignant. 

“I always think myself,” he observed, smilingly, “that it shows 
a great want of originality to run after your neighbor’s wife. Of 
course I know there is a fashion in these things, just as there is in 
trousers, but I never could see the necessity for following it, in either 
case. My own breeks are all wrong, I’m sure,” with a deprecatory 
glance at the lengthy nether limbs stretched out in front of him, 
“ and yours, I see, are all right. I suppose it’s all right about the 
other, too ?” 

“ I say, look here, I do wish y&u’d stop chaffing !” exclaimed 
Johnny, fretfully aware by this time that Glendown’s placidity of 
tone and manner was more prickly to his own vanity than any blame, 
however severe or well-merited, from any other quarter. 

“ Well then, seriously, Johnny, I should advise you not to play 
with edged tools, or you may cut your fingers rather badly.” 

“ It isn’t as if she had a decent husband, don’t you know, to look 
after her. What the deuce are you laughing at ? I give you my 
word of honor that the fellow doesn’t send her enough for the com- 
mon necessaries of life.” 

“Doesn’t he?” said Bertie, whose twitching lips seemed to indi- 
cate that he was on the verge of breaking into most hilarious and 
unbecoming laughter. “ Perhaps her banker might tell us a differ- 
ent story.” 

“ What do you know about her banker ? Look here, you know ” 
(Johnny always implored every one to “look here, you know”), 
“ I’ve mentioned no names, and I don’t intend to.” 

“ Quite unnecessary, in this instance. All the world knows that 
there is only one really ill-used woman in the United Kingdom, and 
her name is — well, we will keep it dark, if you like, Johnny, but 
I’ve heard it coupled with yours pretty often.” 

Johnny’s face glowed with modest pleasure. 

“ I say, what have you heard ?” he questioned, eagerly. 

“ Oh ! nothing out of the way scandalous,” replied Bertie, with a 
humorous squint — a sort of aside to the waving palm-tree above his 
head which the other was too absorbed to detect. 

“ Because, you know, people are no end ill-natured. It doesn’t 


MUTUAL ENLIGHTENMENT 297 

matter what they say of me , but, of course, one doesn’t want her to 
get too much talked of.” 

This was too much for Bertie, who threw himself back on his seat, 
and swayed to and fro for some moments in a paroxysm of silent 
laughter. 

“ I say, Glendown,” in a tone of sincere discomfiture, “ it’s no 
laughing matter — it isn’t, upon my soul !” 

“ No, I can believe it isn’t, if the woman has let you in for a 
couple of thousand. O Lord ! Johnny, you’ll be the death of me ! 
I wish some one would come and hold me.” 

“ I don’t see what you brought me out here for, if you can do 
nothing but laugh at what I tell you,” said Johnny, beginning to turn 
sulky at last under these repeated insults to his dignity as a certifi- 
cated graduate in the school of fashionable social vice. 

“ I brought you out, you young idiot, to see if I could help you 
in what looked like a very ugly scrape; but, upon my word, you 
seem to hug your chains so affectionately, and to be so little alive to 
your own egregious folly, that I may as well spare myself any fur- 
ther trouble. If you wish to go to the devil, don’t let me hinder 
you, and by all means take Mrs. Mandeville with you.” 

When Lord Glendown adopted this tone, he was in no humor for 
trifling or for being trifled with, and Johnny instantly stammered out 
his excuses. 

“ But one never knows where to have you,” he added, deprecat- 
inody. “ You chaff a fellow one minute, and call him over the coals 
the next.” 

“ How did you get involved, in the first instance ?” Bertie asked, 
dryly. 

This was a long story, told with much circumlocution and many 
baitings, and it did no sort of credit to any individual concerned. It 
was likewise an exceedingly old story, and as such need not be re- 
peated here. 

Bertie knew every turn of it. He could tell exactly the point at 
which the man’s folly encountered the woman’s rapacity, the two 
combined giving birth to that scandal which, when discovered, de- 
velops into a cause celebre for the benefit of the public, and failing 
this, serves as an edifying topic of conversation in club coteries and 
ladies’ boudoirs. 

Bertie listened to it all with an inward shrug of the shoulders. He 
could understand such a thing as lawless love or overmastering pas- 
sion. But this masquerade of both, this competition, as it were, of 


298 


. THE PRICE OF A PEARL 


empty-headed youths and men in senseless luxury and elegant profli- 
gacy, simply disgusted him. He knew not which to contemn the 
more heartily — the dissipated greenhorn, or the mercenary woman 
who had so successfully befooled him. 

“ Well,” he said, quietly, when Johnny’s narrative had come to a 
full stop. “ Have yon had enough, or do you propose to continue 
your acquaintance with this lady ?” 

“ I don’t know how to get out of it,” Johnny admitted, awkward- 
ly if sincerely. 

Glendown mused for a little while in silence. Certainly there 
were not many illusions to be destroyed here ; still there was enough 
of Christian charity in this eccentric individual to prevent him from 
rejoicing either in the narration or the narrative of iniquity. 

“ It’s not the first time you’ve been fleeced,” he remarked, pres- 
ently. “ I could tell you rather a curious story, if you care to hear 
it, on the understanding, of course, that it goes no further.” 

Johnny fairly gasped with astonishment at this liberal offer, and 
willingly swore himself to secrecy. 

“ Carry your memory a long way back,” began Bertie, with one 
of his blandest smiles, “to a fancy-ball given by your people at Fin- 
gall, at which you had^ws^ a little too much champagne, and man- 
aged to break Mrs. Mandeville’s arm.” 

“ I say,” ejaculated Johnny, reproachfully, “ what’s the good of 
reminding a fellow of that?” 

“ Probably you haven’t the slightest idea of the mischief you per- 
petrated on that occasion. However, I don’t propose to dwell on 
your awkwardness, Johnny, though it has had very awkward conse- 
quences for a good many persons concerned — yourself, I take it, 
among the number !” 

“ It’s such an old story,” murmured Johnny, as sulkily as he 
dared. 

“Sorry I had to rake it up, but you’ll understand why presently. 
Now go back, please, to a concert in Kensington Palace Gardens, 
where I had the pleasure of meeting your people and yourself, one 
evening last November. Do you remember it?” 

Johnny nodded in evident perplexity at the demands thus made 
upon his powers of recollection. 

“ Miss Merry weather was one of the performers at that concert. 
I dare say you can recall the circumstance, Johnny, and also the 
fact that you and your people saw fit to cut her before I came in ?” 

Johnny shifted his position uneasily, and suggested that perhaps 


MUTUAL ENLIGHTENMENT 


290 


Glendovvn did not know what people had once thought about Miss 
Merry weather’s behavior in that little matter of his mother’s sap- 
phires some years ago. It was hushed up, of course, but — 

“ Yes,” interrupted Glendown, rather sharply, “ Mr. Lewis took 
care of that.” 

Johnny looked extremely unhappy at this reminder. It was in- 
deed a sore subject with the whole house of Lowick that Mr. Lewis, 
suiting his weapons to his foes with a sagacity in matters social that 
no one had ever dreamed of ascribing to him, had put a full stop to 
the sapphire scandal by simply threatening to have Johnny Watson 
blackballed for the Junior Royalty Club, membership of which at 
that time represented to the young man the summit of his terres- 
trial ambition. 

“ Can’t see any earthly good in going back to that business,” he 
said, looking about as comfortable as an insect might be expected 
to do when transfixed by the naturalist’s pin and surveyed through 
his lens. 

“ Necessary, my dear boy, to explain what I’m going to tell you. 
It was you who discovered those blessed sapphires, I believe, and 
found out that young Merry weather had sold them?” 

“Well, come,” retorted Johnny, with every symptom of turning 
restive under this persistent cross-examination ; “ I suppose you’re 
not going to make out that Merry weather didn't sell them ?” 

“ lie didn’t sell them for himself,” very calmly and very pointed- 
ly spoken. 

“Exactly the point,” almost shouted the Honorable John, “and 
you bet that Bat Lewis knew very well who got him to sell them !” 

“Shouldn’t in the least object to take up that bet,” replied 
Bertie, with the utmost good-humor. “ Bat Lewis did know, and 
he had his own reasons for not wishing the knowledge to be dis- 
persed abroad and given to the public.” 

“Hanged if I can understand what you want to prove!” 

Johnny’s flushed face conveyed the idea that he regarded himself 
as having been most unfairly dealt with. He had been promised 
a story, a curious story, and iustead of that a dish of stale and un- 
pleasant memories had been served up to him. Like the discom- 
fited Jonah when the gourd withered, he felt that he did well to 
be angry. 

But Bertie’s good-humor seemed proof against any amount of 
smouldering resentment or puerile displeasure. 

“ T don’t propose to prove anything,” he answered, with one of 


300 


THE PRICE OF A PEARL 


those lazy smiles that always proclaimed him master of the situa- 
tion, “but you have my full permission, Johnny, now, or at any 
other time, to ask Mrs. Mandevile what she did with the money 
she got for those sapphires.” 

“ What do you mean?” gasped Johnny, horrified at the idea thus 
blandly conveyed to him. 

“ I mean that Mrs. Mandeville appropriated those sapphires her- 
self, when she was under your father’s roof being treated for a sim- 
ple fracture. Is it possible that not one of you had the sense to 
connect the theft with her ? Why, man alive, she was there on the 
spot! She lay on the sofa in your mother’s boudoir, day after day 
for over a fortnight, as you’re well aware to your cost, and only one 
of her arms, Johnny, was broken. The left hand was still available 
for picking and stealing.” 

“But look here,” began Johnny, helplessly, “the fellow himself 
said—” 

“ Yes, yes, I know very well what he said — more fool he ! Now 
let me proceed to tell you what he did 

“ He bolted !” exclaimed Johnny, in breathless haste to score a 
point against this intolerably complacent adversary. 

“ He bolted, as you pertinently observe. And Bat Lewis set a 
couple of private detectives on his track, who finally ran him to 
earth on board a sailing-vessel in the Liverpool docks. But he had 
slept two nights en route — where do you think, Johnny ?” 

Johnny’s trembling lips refused to frame an answer to this playful 
query, and, after a few moments, Lord Glendown went on, quietly : 

“ It was not under the parental roof, as one might have supposed 
a priori , especially if his sister was the chief factor in his misfort- 
unes. No, my poor boy, I regret to have to open your eyes about 
this lady who no doubt has managed to throw plenty of dust in 
them before now ; but if her poor despised husband hadn’t chanced 
by the greatest good-luck to be a personal friend of Mr. Bartholo- 
mew Lewis, the detective would have had very little trouble indeed 
in unravelling the whole mystery, and you would have all looked 
rather foolish, I fancy, when the real truth came out.” 

Poor Johnny at this moment looked more than foolish — he was 
wellnigh stupefied. He had been brought up with so strong a 
sense of meum if not of tuum , that anything which outraged this 
seemed to cast into the shade all other crimes, events, or personali- 
ties ; and his narrow brain almost reeled now at the complete nov- 
elty of the idea presented for its acceptance. 


MUTUAL ENLIGHTENMENT 


301 


“ But the money was paid back to the jeweller,” he ventured to 
say at last, timidly and stammeringly. 

“ So I understand, but can you tell me by whom ?” 

No answer; but Johnny’s long jaw dropped till it seemed doubt- 
ful whether it was not fairly dislocated. 

“ Mrs. Mandeville knows, you may be sure of that, though it 
is quite possible the money didn’t come out of her pocket, after all. 
You may have helped to pay it yourself, for aught I know. She 
seems to have had a good deal out of you from first to last.” 

Still Johnny could find no words to express his abject self-humil- 
iation, but beads of perspiration stood upon his sloping forehead, and 
his staring light-blue eyes were eloquent of a most undivine despair. 

“Why did the fellow go?” he gasped, after a long pause, in 
which his memory played hide-and-seek with the history that had 
just been put before him. 

“ Why ?” repeated Glendown, with a powerful accent of pardon- 
able scorn in his voice that almost made the wretched cur beside 
him wince as if a lash had blistered his thick skin. “ Could he 
stay, if either she or he was not to appear in the felon’s dock on a 
charge of common theft ?” 

“ What became of him ?” 

Glendown shrugged his shoulders. 

“I don’t know, neither does she, which speaks volumes, doesn’t 
it? for her sense of gratitude. Well, Johnny, I shouldn’t have 
told you this story, if I had thought you cared a brass farthing for 
the heroine ; but as I knew you only wanted to qualify for the part 
of co-respondent in case Mandeville should advise himself to get a 
divorce, there’s no harm in telling you the truth. You can throw 
the burden of disproof on her whenever it suits you to do so. I 
don’t suppose you’ll care to mention the matter to any one else, as 
it isn’t greatly to your credit.” 

“ But look here, you know — about Miss Merry weather. I don’t 
see how you can blame a fellow for not being very keen about 
speaking to her. How was one to know, don’t you know ?” 

Johnny’s voice sounded aggrieved, as if he considered himself 
unjustly treated, and Glendown could not forbear smiling. 

“Miss Merry weather made no complaints. Don’t flatter yourself 
so far as to think that she resented your behavior that evening; but 
I did for her, as I fancy your mother understood pretty plainly.” 

“ Of course they’ve called now, since the engagement was an- 
nounced. I will myself, when I get back.” 


302 


THE PRICE OF A PEARL 


“ What engagement do you mean ?” 

“ Why, hers, of course. Miss Merry weather’s. Surely you’ve 

heard of it?” 

Johnny sat upright in sheer amazement at his companion’s igno- 
rance. He confidently expected that Glendown would do the same, 
and was scarcely prepared for the leisurely way in which that eccen- 
tric individual observed, simply : 

“Just say that again, will you, Johnny? The sun makes me stu- 
pider than usual. Who is engaged to whom ?” 

“ Miss Merry weather is engaged to Bat Lewis. It was in last week’s 
‘ Facts.’ ” 

“ Oh, then of course it’s fiction !” Lazily and smilingly uttered. 

“ It isn't fiction,” averred Johnny, with evident asperity. If there 
was one thing more than another on which he piqued himself, it 
was his correct information on all social topics. “ My mother men- 
tioned it ten days ago. She and Sybil had been to call — ” 

“ Believing her to be a common thief ! Oh, that is rich !” 

Bertie’s laughter was so immoderate as to be almost unseemly, 
but none the less was it of invaluable service as a mask to his real 
feelings. It effectually nettled Johnny, who was thus completely 
blinded to the true significance of his own recent disclosure. 

“ Look here, I say ! I suppose my people may be trusted to know 
what’s what in good society, and if Mr. Lewis could overlook what 
had happened — ” 

“For Heaven’s sake, Johnny, shut up, or I shall take your life, or 
my own, or somebody’s. It is a good joke, and you’ve kept it up 
remarkably well, but — ” 

“ It isn't a joke. You may see it for yourself in your Galignani. 
They’re to be married after Easter.” 

Silence for a few moments, in which Bertie mentally adjusted that 
fool’s-cap which he had ever proved to be his safest and most effect- 
ual disguise. 

“ Nevertheless, it is a joke, dear boy, though not of your making. 
Ta-ta! See you again by-and-by. Don’t forget all the admirable 
advice I’ve given you.” 

He strolled away as he spoke, with smiling lips and squinting eyes 
that matched his lightly-uttered words. 

Certain other words spoken by himself a little while before came 
back to his mind now with startling irony : 

“When a fellow is unmanned, distinctly unmanned, as you were 
just now, one may fairly suppose some woman is answerable for it.” 


MUTUAL ENLIGHTENMENT 


303 


Alas ! he knew well enough that he was unmanned, that his forced 
mirth was all but hysterical, that there were tears of rage, of disap- 
pointment, nay more, of despair, blinding his eyes and choking his 
throat, notwithstanding the fixed grin upon his grotesque visage. 
Whether these were for himself or his friend he could not tell, but 
he knew that a woman was answerable for them, and at that moment 
he very nearly hated her. He knew afterwards he ought only to have 
pitied her. 


CHAPTER II 


CHARACTER OR DESTINY? 

“ [She] needed that deep and enduring conviction that the heart and intel- 
lect, feeling and reason united, can alone supply.” 

It was indeed as Johnny Watson had said; and his mother’s showy 
yellow landau was only one of many smart carriages that drove up in 
these days to the door of Miss Merry weather’s highly unfashionable 
quarters, and sometimes even blocked the narrow street. 

This was in the spring, when the weather was bright and balmy, 
and Pearl’s approaching marriage with one of the richest men in Lon- 
don was a topic of general conversation. 

But in the gloomy winter months, when Miss Margaret Wetberall 
lay on her sick-bed, and the future seemed if possible more hopeless 
and more dreary than the past, there was no plethora of sympathetic 
friends or kind comforters to smooth her pillow for her or cheer her 
suffering days. 

This was the way of the world. She did not quarrel with it after- 
wards, feeling indeed that she had been blessed beyond her deserts, 
because one friend — one only — remained faithful to her when no 
one else seemed to care two straws whether she lived or died. She 
was very ill for weeks after that midnight adventure underground, 
as any one might indeed have foreseen that she would be. 

Chilled as she had been, first in heart, and then in body by ex- 
posure to the bitter night air, it was not surprising that her sen- 
sitive throat and chest should be seriously affected, and that her ill- 
ness, if not precisely dangerous, should be both painful and tedious. 

Moreover, it was complicated by a strange apathy and listlessness 
for which Mrs. Fursden was altogether at a loss to account. Her 
niece had left her on that eventful New-year’s Eve radiant and ex- 
pansive, her eyes sparkling, her look tender. She came back a few 
hours later a pale shivering ghost, her features pinched, her voice 
husky, her eyes clouded. What had happened in the interval to 
account for such a revolution ? Why should an unexpected meeting 


CHARACTER OR DESTINY? 


305 


with a former suitor, however undesirable or unwelcome, have power 
thus to metamorphose Pearl’s whole being and darken her whole 
horizon? Yet, as far as Mrs. Fursden could tell, there was no other 
cause for the startling change which appeared to have come over the 
spirit of her niece’s dream. 

Lewis himself seemed to her sincerely to be pitied, and all her 
womanly compassion was enlisted on behalf of this lonely-natured, 
cold-mannered man whose many admirable qualities w-ere so curious- 
ly nullified, so apparently cancelled by the unfortunate dryness of his 
physical temperament. 

She felt indeed that his life had been one long tragedy, simply 
because no woman had ever found the key to his heart. Small 
wonder that the bolts should now be stiff and the lock itself rusty. 
He came often to see her during that gloomy winter, and, seldom 
as he could be induced to speak about himself, she learned to know 
him well and to respect him sincerely. 

It was wonderful, too, how much the old lady found herself con- 
fiding to him on these occasions, when he was wont to sit opposite 
to her in attentive silence, though when she looked back afterwards 
on the visit she could not recall any leading questions on his part, 
and very few responsive comments. 

“ Have you had other advice ?” he asked one day, abruptly, when 
Mrs. Fursden came down from Pearl’s room looking more than usu- 
ally distressed and anxious, and for the first time in all these weary 
weeks admitted that there was no real improvement. 

“ And I can’t help remembering,” she added, despondently, “ that 
her mother’s illness began exactly in the same way. First she had 
a sore throat and then a cough, and the next thing we knew was 
that both her lungs were affected.” 

Dead silence for a moment, and then Mr. Lewis put his brief 
question. 

“ Have you had other advice ?” 

“ Not yet. She wouldn’t hear of it.” 

“ Will you let me send ?” naming one of the leading physi- 

cians of the day. 

“ But — Mr. Lewis — I’m afraid — ” 

Mrs. Fursden paused, and looked embarrassed. She could guess, 
if she did not kuow, what sort of a fee such a doctor was likely to 
expect for a visit to this remote region. 

Mr. Lewis answered her implied objection. 

“Perhaps you will kindly give me Dr. Merry weather’s address. 

30 


306 


THE PRICE OF A PEARL 


I can settle the matter with him. There is no need to say anything 
to your niece.” 

Not another syllable did he utter during the remainder of the 
visit, but Mrs. Fursden’s heart ached for the blank misery so plainly 
visible on his set countenance. 

The following afternoon the great specialist made his appearance, 
and, in some secret trepidation as to Pearl’s reception of a stranger, 
Mrs. Fursden conducted him to the sick-chamber. 

His examination was minute and conscientious. He applied the 
stethoscope in every direction, sounded her chest with light, skilful 
fingers, peeped down her throat by the aid of some modern contriv- 
ance quite new to both aunt and niece, and made her repeat the 
mystical word “ ninety - nine ” so often that Mrs. Fursden inquired 
at last if there was any particular charm attached to the number. 

“ No charm, but it is the best test we have of the condition of 
the lungs.” 

He got up then to take his departure, and Mrs. Fursden followed 
him out of the room. 

“Nothing organically wrong,” he said, in answer to her anxious 
inquiry, “ but she never ought to sing again in public, nor teach 
either. The life is too hard for her.” 

He went away a few minutes later, having first made a few hiero- 
glyphieal marks on half a sheet of paper for the benefit of the 
neighboring chemist. 

Mrs. Fursden, more dismayed than she was willing to admit even 
to herself at the full significance of this verdict, travelled up-stairs 
again, slowly and painfully, and sat down panting beside her niece’s 
bed. 

“ I’m not going to die,” said Pearl, in a tone of weary indiffer- 
ence. “ No one need be afraid of that.” 

“ No, thank God ! He says there’s nothing organically wrong 
with you, dear child.” 

“ Who sent him here?” 

“Your — father — I believe — arranged the visit,” said Mrs. Furs- 
den, with an inward prayer for pardon ; for, after all, had there been 
time to arrange anything, even if — 

Pearl’s raised eyebrows betrayed the utmost incredulity, and her 
very cough sounded sceptical. 

“ Papa !” she said, faintly. “ I don’t believe it.” 

“ The doctor mentioned your father’s name,” continued Mrs. 
Fursden, with the awkwardness of habitual honesty. 


CHARACTER OR DESTINY? 


307 


Deception, like most other arts, requires a certain amount of 
practice, and this truthful old lady was painfully aware of her own 
clumsiness. 

“ Was any other name mentioned ?” Pearl asked, presently. 

“ No, my dear, none.” 

“ He didn’t say that Mr. Lewis had sent him ?” 

Mrs. Fursden shook her head, and Pearl asked no more questions. 

But there was a hunted look in her eyes, the meaning of which 
Aunt Emily could not misread, though she diligently averted her 
own, and talked with fictitious cheerfulness on a variety of perfectly 
indifferent subjects. 

Mr. Lewis paid no visit that day, nor for many days afterwards; 
but a hamper of the finest and dryest champagne procurable was 
left at the house next morning, and Mrs. Fursden looked exceedingly 
guilty when Pearl asked, dryly : 

“ Did my father order that, too ?” 

“I — suppose he must have,” said Aunt Emily, vaguely and un- 
grammatically. 

Her niece smiled rather bitterly, but made no further comment. 

Later in the day came a note from Mr. Lewis, brief and business- 
like as himself in office-hours, in which he stated simply that he had 
been summoned out of town on pressing and important business, 
that he expected to be away for nearly a fortnight, and that Mrs. 
Fursden and Miss Merryweather would oblige him by making use of 
his carriage during his absence. 

“ If he had not written,” observed Pearl, with a veiled mockery 
of tone and manner which betrayed her secret smart, “ you would 
have tried, I suppose, to persuade me that my father had arranged 
for the carriage to be sent from the nearest livery-stables ?” 

“ It is very kind of Mr. Lewis,” replied Mrs. Fursden, evading this 
charge with feminine feebleness. “ Driving is just what will set you 
up, now that you are able to leave your room.” 

“Or being driven,” corrected her niece, with satirical emphasis; 
“ that’s more like the real state of the case, Aunt Emily.” 

Aunt Emily left this amendment unchallenged. She was aware 
that, in a matter of so delicate a nature as the one now at issue, least 
said was soonest mended. 

But all her unworldliness and all her childlike faith in Providence 
did not blind her to the fact that the wolf of poverty was very near 
the door, and could not be barred out much longer — the champagne 
and the daily drives notwithstanding ; for this illness of Pearl’s had 


308 


THE PRICE OF A PEARL 


been terribly costly. Money had gone out in plenty, but there was 
very little coming in, and likely to be still less in future if, as the 
doctor had hinted, the musical career must be abandoned. 

It had been hard enough sometimes to make both ends meet in 
the days when poor Pearl had as much work to do as she could 
manage. But how would the task be accomplished when she could 
give no lessons and accept no engagements? The question was as 
hard as it was pressing, and it seemed as if there could be only one 
answer. But so sensitive was the dear old lady’s conscience that she 
could not make up her mind either to put the question or to prompt 
the answer, and so Pearl was left alone, as every woman must be 
sooner or later, face to face with the Sphinx’s problem. 

One bright day, about a fortnight later, in place of the usual an- 
nouncement that the carriage was at the door, came a pencilled line 
from Mr. Lewis to Miss Merry weather : 

“ Will you drive with me this afternoon ? Say yes or no to bearer. 
— B. L.” 

“ Yes,” nodded Pearl, and tossed the note across the table to her 
aunt. 

“ I might as well have done it six years ago,” she said, trench- 
antly, as soon as the door had closed behind the servant. 

“Done what, dear child? I don’t quite understand you.” 

“ Done what I am going to do now — sell myself to the devil.” 

“ Hush, Pearl dearest ! How can you speak so recklessly ? This 
is a good man, my child, and he will be good to you. Tell him 
what is in your heart, and you will not repent it.” 

“ Oh ! I don’t mean to imply that he’s the devil, Aunt Emily. 
Very far from it. I am aware that he is a good man, though I 
would just as soon tear my heart out and throw it down on that 
table as let him see what is in it. But, none the less, the devil will 
be glad that I do this thing, and God will be sorry.” 

“ Why do you do it then, Pearl, if you feel like that ?” her aunt 
asked her, very sadly. 

“Because I have no choice,” was the fierce answer, “and you 
know I have none. I might say as truly as ever old Naomi did 
that the Almighty has dealt very bitterly with me. My home has 
been taken away twice over — my father, and my brother, and — 
other things not worth mentioning, and now— my voice, so that I 
can’t even keep this poor little dwelling-place either.” 

“ Then let us find one together somewhere else ; but don’t do this 
man such a cruel wrong as to marry him if you cannot love him.” 


CHARACTER OR DESTINY? 


309 


Pearl’s smile was more pregnant with tragedy than the bitterest 
tears ever shed by mortal womau. 

“There is nothing else left to do now, and, as I said before, I 
might as well have done it six years ago. Only — there seemed 
some reason then why I shouldn’t.” 

“ And is there no reason now ? What has happened, Pearl, since 
the night you came and knelt here, and put your head on my shoul- 
der, and told me that you felt so good and gentle ?” 

“ Nothing has happened ; but I made a mistake, that’s all. And 
now I had better not make another. Good - bye, Aunt Emily. 
Don’t cry. I’m not crying, as you may see. I shall never shed a 
tear again for any one.” 

In this mood of dry-eyed misery she went to meet her destiny. 
Or was it rather her own character — aspiring, unbalanced, faithless, 
credulous, impulsive, vacillating, in one word, contradictory through- 
out — which, under the mask of fate, was now to confront her, and 
turn her life henceforward as it would ? 


CHAPTER III 


SOME DAY 

“There is no greater unrest to be found than on the heart we love and 
doubt.” 

“I wonder if this place brings back any memories to your mind, 
Miss Merryweatker, or have you written off all memories as unprof- 
itable investments ?” 

The place in question was a veritable fairy-land, a sort of flower- 
garden under glass, planted with foreign shrubs and large tree-ferns 
and blossoming camellias, where one might pace up and down as 
freely as on the gravelled terrace outside, or sit in low hammock- 
chairs against a background of hanging verdure. 

By various roads which she either did not know or did not notice, 
Mr. Lewis had conducted her to this enchanted palace, the balmy 
air of which was just sufficiently heated to allow of her sitting down 
without risk of chill after her long imprisonment in-doors. 

And then, having explained to her his rights and privileges in a 
place where the general public was clearly not admitted, he, as it 
were, threw down his glove by bidding her look back upon the mir- 
ror of the past, if haply she might guess his motive in bringing her 
here this afternoon. She glanced first at him, then round about her 
at the mingling shades of green above their heads, then again at him, 
and a troubled look of comprehension dawned in her eyes. 

Yes; the place had memories for her. Once before, nearly six 
years ago, he and she had been alone together in surroundings much 
the same as these, and then, as now, she had felt helplessly that fem- 
inine wiles and light unmeaning words would avail her nothing. 
Fencing was out of the question with a man who threw 7 away his 
rapier and folded his arms and looked at her, as he was looking 
now, with sad wistful eyes which, whether they read her truly or 
not, had always had this strange effect, that they revealed her to 
herself. 

Was this the secret of her abiding fear of him, no less than her 
unconscious reverence ? A love as relentless as hate is almost as ter- 


SOME DAY 


311 


rible as hate. No dross of motive, no alloy in deed, can live in the 
fierce devouring flame of such a fire. 

Pearl trembled now, as she had trembled long ago in the fernery 
at Fingall, and felt that to marry this man without loving him would 
be to slay her own soul by sacrilege. It would be the sin of the 
priest who poisons in the Holy Eucharist. It would be, indeed, as 
she had said so bitterly that very afternoon, to sell herself to the 
devil. 

All this flashed through her mind during the few moments that 
parted his question from her answer. 

“ If I could have banished my memories, I would — long ago.” 

“ All of them ?” he said — so quietly that no one could have gauged 
the magnitude of the stake he had set upon that brief query. 

“ All of them,” she answered, quickly, putting out her hand with 
an imploring gesture. “ Please don’t remind me of anything, Mr. 
Lewis, for I have forgotten nothing.” 

“Very well. We will start fair. The past is done with. I take 
it we have both suffered.” 

She bowed her head in silence. 

“ And — perhaps — both sinned.” 

The words were barely audible, but they echoed in Pearl’s empty 
aching heart like rolling thunderclaps. 

“ I can answer for myself,” she said, bitterly, “ that no sin goes 
unpunished. I might go further, and say that it is never forgiven.” 

“ For God’s sake, Pearl, don’t say that to me ! for I want His for- 
giveness badly, and I want it through you.” 

Surely, no man ever pleaded for a woman’s love in such strange 
terms as these. But the woman only answered, with a heavy sigh : 

“ That would be a poor sort of forgiveness that came through me.” 

“ Why have you hidden yourself from me all these years ? Did it 
never once strike you that you were cruel ?” 

“ I think it would be far more cruel to give you what you want.” 

“ I am willing to take the risk. You don’t love me yet, I know.” 

No answer, but perhaps he needed none, and he went on, after a 
moment : 

“ Long ago, Pearl, I asked for your love, but I don’t ask for it 
now. And when you offered me your friendship, I refused it. I 
would refuse it still. If you won’t give me what I ask for now, I 
shall never trouble you again. I shall know then that — ” 

He broke off there, and she heard a sharp click in his throat — a 
sound so painfully suggestive of mental anguish that she dared not 


312 


THE PRICE OF A PEARL 


look upon his face. After a moment or two he got up, moved away 
a few paces to the open door, and, having stood there for a little 
while looking out on the terrace, he came back and touched her hand 
gently. 

His own was trembling, but apparently he had regained his lost 
composure, for he said, in his usual unemotional accents : 

“ Will you come here for a moment ? Do you see those two peo- 
ple outside on the terrace ? I want you to look at them.” 

“ Who are they ?” she asked, following him to the door, and look- 
ing as he bade her, not without some secret wonder and perplexity 
at his interest in what seemed at first sight a very commonplace 
couple. 

“ I don’t know. They were here yesterday. I noticed them then.” 

What was there to notice? Pearl asked herself, with increasing 
amazement. It was such a pair as might be seen any day. The 
man stout, bald, and elderly, the woman scarcely younger, her hand 
resting lightly on her husband’s arm, her eyes fixed upon an open 
book — a novel apparently — from which she seemed to be reading 
aloud as the two paced slowly together along the gravelled terrace. 

“Why do you want me to look at them, Mr. Lewis?” she said at 
last, a little timidly ; for there was something in his face that awed 
her, though every nerve and muscle now were under perfect control. 

“You will see why when they turn. Look at the man now. Do 
you notice nothing strange about him ?” 

Yes ; there was something very strange indeed about him, some- 
thing Pearl had never seen before. The bright rays of the after- 
noon sun were beating full upon his upturned face. Almost it seemed 
as if he courted the dazzling light. The woman at his side shaded 
her eyes with the book she carried in her hand, but he walked on 
with erect head and steady eyelids. 

“ He is blind !” exclaimed Pearl, in a low, excited whisper. 

Lewis bowed his head in silence. 

“ And that is why he can bear to face the sun.” 

“Of course. It has no light for him.” Again she heard that 
painful click in his throat, and then, in one lightning flash of com- 
prehension, she saw why he had brought her here. “ I shall be like 
that some day.” 

“ No, no, dear friend, don’t say it. I can’t believe it.” 

Her voice was eloquent of pity, sincere and even tender pity, of 
the sort that might almost pass for love. Tears were glistening in 
her eyes. He saw them, and his very heart stood still with tapture. 


t 


SOME DAY 


313 


How should he know that they were surface tears, springing not 
from the deeps, but from the mere shallows of emotion ? 

“ The darkness might overtake me to-morrow, and I should not 
care if — ” 

No need to finish his sentence. His longing eyes said the rest. 
They looked at each other for a moment in perfect silence, and then 
he led her back to her former place. 

“ You do care, Pearl — a little ?” very gently and very wistfully 
spoken. 

“ I — yes — of course I — care.” 

“And you can give me what I want?” 

“Are you satisfied with what I can give you ?” 

“ Yes. It is as much as I can hope for now. You will give it to 
me, Pearl ?” 

He held out his hand as he spoke. There was a moment’s breath- 
less pause before she put hers into it. In her own mind she was re- 
peating the bitter words she had said to Mrs. Fursden, “ There is 
nothing else left for me to do.” 

Something in her gesture aroused his misgivings. It was as if 
she held him away from her, even in the act of giving him her 
hand. 

“ I am robbing no man ?” he said, and his failing eyes sought to 
read her heart in hers. 

“No man.” 

It was a cold answer, coldly spoken, and it scarcely reassured him. 

“You forbade me to remind you of old days, but I cannot forget, 
Pearl — that once — some one stood between us.” 

Again a breathless silence, and then she answered, slowly and dis- 
tinctly : 

“ No one stands between us now.” 

Was it true? Was not every throb of her heart at that moment 
crying shame upon her tacit falsehood, not indeed to the lover who, 
as she supposed, had forgotten her, but to her own soul ? 

“ Then, dearest, if that is so — ” 

She felt herself being gently drawn towards him, and again almost 
unconsciously she held back. Again he waited — with the patience 
that is “almost power.” 

“Some day, perhaps, you will know how you have made me 
suffer.” 

“ I never meant — to make you suffer.” 

“ Pearl, my dearest, give yourself to me without fear. Trust me, 


314 


THE PRICE OF A PEARL 


I can make a woman love me — even now. Give me the chance, and 
I will.” 

Still he held her hand in his. Still it was not withdrawn, but still 
he felt — he could not but feel — that something parted them. 

“ Do you dread the shadow that is coming on my life ? Are you 
afraid that it will darken yours?” 

She shook her head, and he did not guess that already the thought 
of his coming blindness had half-slipped from her — that the tran- 
sient pity kindled in her heart by what he had told her was scarcely 
alight at this moment. 

“Let me tell you,” he said, simply, “ what the oculist told me, and 
then you will know the worst. You remember that night I met you 
in the train ?” 

“ Yes, I remember.” 

“My mind misgave me then that there must be something terribly 
amiss with my sight when I could be so near you , Pearl, and not 
know you. Of course, you know my eyes have always been my 
weak point. Blind Bat Lewis is the name I have gone by all my 
life. I shall be blind in earnest before my life is done. I don’t 
mean to-day or to-morrow, but before I reach the age of that man 
you saw just now.” 

“ Did the oculist tell you that ?” 

“ That is the drift of what he told me.” 

“But — can nothing be done?” 

“ Nothing, dearest. The sight of one eye is all but gone now, and 
the other will go too from sympathy. It’s only a question of time. 
It may be sooner, it may be later. Perhaps” (with one of his faint 
shadowy smiles) “ perhaps you will come here with me some day, 
Pearl, and we shall walk up and down together, and I shall dare to 
look the sun full in the face.” 

No word from Pearl; but she sighed, a long, deep-drawn sigh that 
seemed to him to give consent to what he asked of her, and to 
breathe a gentle compassion which he would fan into love some day. 

Still keeping her hand fast prisoner in one of his, he pointed with 
the other in the direction of the terrace. 

“ They are very happy, those two. I don’t pity the man, though 
he is in darkness. He is not alone.” 

“ But perhaps she is,” thought Pearl, sadly, with a sudden pre- 
vision of that potential solitude a deux which makes married life 
apart from married love so terrible a bondage to a sensitive nature. 

“And I have been alone, Pearl, for over a score of years. Since 


SOME DAY 


315 


my poor wife slept herself into the grave — through my coldness — I 
have asked no woman to share my life, or touch my lips with hers — 
except — ” 

“ If I am different from what you think me, perhaps you will be 
cold to me, too ?” 

“ Never — so help me, God — never. Have I done penance all these 
years in vain ? Look, Pearl ! You have heard of secret tortures 
men inflict upon themselves. This is mine.” 

He relinquished her hand and turned aside for a moment. What 
was he going to show her that he became so deadly pale and looked 
at her so strangely ? 

“ I will have no secret from you, my dearest. All that is in my 
heart you shall know before you take me into yours.” 

Alas ! The words stabbed her as if they had been sharp swords, 
for she knew that her heart was closed to him. The next moment 
he had placed before her a miniature, and then drawing back a step 
or two he folded his arms with a dignity that almost made him 
noble, and watched the face of the living woman whom he loved as 
she gazed upon the face of the dead. 

For it was a picture of a dead woman that she held in her hand, 
not sleeping but dead, as fair and colorless as herself, and far more 
beautiful than she had ever been, but white with the peculiar waxy 
tint of death, food for the worms that were to make her dust and 
ashes. And this was the secret torture that the man had set himself 
to bear, as penance for a sin that he counted unforgiven. 

Pearl looked at it with dry eyes that suddenly distended with a 
nameless terror. For as she gazed it seemed to her that there was 
a strange likeness in that dead face to a living one which she was 
doing her best to forget. Was it her disordered fancy, or did she 
really see a shadow, more than a shadow of Hector’s well-cut feat- 
ures in this flawless profile? She could not tell, for the next mo- 
ment the picture was taken from her, and her lover’s voice asked 
her : 

“ Is this to part us, Pearl ?” 

She lifted her eyes to his, and saw that he had indeed kept noth- 
ing back from her. It was a true heart, however morbid and mis- 
taken, that he laid bare to her that day. The face that seemed to 
thrust itself between herself and him was not that of his dead wife. 
She was not jealous of his past, but something told her that, if he 
could read her heart as she had read his, he would be justly jealous, 
and renounce all claim on it forever. Should she, in her turn, be 


316 


THE PRICE OF A PEARL 


fearlessly honest, and confess to him boldly that, whether Hector 
Armytage remembered her or not, he had made it impossible for her 
ever to forget him ? 

She hesitated, and the golden moment of her life passed by. At 
sight of her softened face his own lighted up with an utter bewil- 
derment of gratitude. 

“ It shall not part us. From this day forward, Pearl, I will never 
look at it again.” 

He put his arms round her, and she resisted him no longer. She 
heard him murmur incoherent words of rapture above her bowed 
head. 

“ Look at me, my dearest,” he whispered. “ Let me see your 
face. Let me.” 

She obeyed him ; it was her place to obey him now. He gazed 
at her for a moment or two in silent ecstasy, and then — the memory 
of Hector’s kiss came over her like a chill wind from a graveyard, 
and her lips shuddered as they met his. 


CHAPTER IV 


A COLD HAND 

“What do we give to our beloved? 

A little faith all undisproved, 

A little dust to overweep, 

And bitter memories to make 

The whole earth blasted for our sake. 

He giveth His beloved sleep.” 

“ The question is what to call him,” said Pearl, knitting her 
brows in a sort of pretty, fictitious perplexity over a blank sheet of 
note-paper, on which she was about to write to her future husband. 

Her engagement was over a fortnight old. It was already public 
property, announced in the Morning Post , hinted at in “ Facts,” 
and discussed by society. But as yet Pearl had not made up her 
mind by what name to address her accepted lover — at least, on paper ; 
and apparently Mrs. Fursden did not think it necessary to proffer 
any counsel on the subject, for in response to her niece’s soliloquiz- 
ing query, she merely asked : 

“ What does he want you to do $” 

“ To go down with him to-morrow afternoon to St. Cuthbert’s and 
receive his uncle’s benediction. He proposes I should sleep there for 
a couple of nights, and he will bring me back on Monday morning.” 

“ But, my dear — ” began Mrs. Fursden, doubtfully. 

“Oh, it’s all right on the score of propriety. Of course, he 
knows you can’t stand the railway ; but there is a lady-nurse, it ap- 
pears, in charge of the old gentleman — a sort of Abishag, I believe, 
to cherish him when his nephew is not there — and she, of course, will 
act as hostess.” 

“ Then you mean to go ?” 

“ Oh yes, I must go. It will please him, and I wish to please him, 
though I believe you don’t give me credit, Aunt Emily, for any 
such laudable intentions.” 

Aunt Emily took no notice of this tacit challenge, and after a 
momentary pause her nieoe returned to the original question. 


318 


THE PRICE OF A PEARL 


“ What is one to call him ? Mr. Lewis sounds too stiff. Bar- 
tholomew is such a mouthful, and Bat is so dreadfully unromantic.” 

“ I should think Bat would be most suitable,” replied Mrs. Furs- 
den, with that dry quietness of intonation which, from usually 
gentle lips, is more incisive than undisguised sarcasm in the mouth 
of an open enemy. 

“ I had better follow my father’s example,” Pearl remarked, care- 
lessly, ignoring in her turn the secret significance of her aunt’s 
words. 

For it was an understood thing between the two women that they 
were henceforward to leave the depths and realities of life unex- 
plored in their conversation, and deal only with its surface and 
“ phenomena ;” in other words, that each should shut her eyes to the 
inward thoughts and feelings of the other. 

So far the arrangement had not resulted in much satisfaction to 
either party. 

“ I had better follow my father’s example, and call him mon ami. 
You saw the telegram, didn’t you?” 

“ What telegram do you mean ?” 

“The one he sent to — Mr. Lewis, when he wrote to him about 
the doctor. l Je conjie ma fille a mon ami' It was very character- 
istic, don’t you think so?” 

“ Does he intend to give you away ?” 

“ I suppose so. If not, you must, Aunt Emily.” 

“ Never ,” flashed the old lady, with a fine impulse of just sever- 
ity. 

Pearl raised her eyebrows in well-assumed astonishment. 

“ Am I too precious ?” she demanded, lightly. 

“ He is too good.” 

“ I’ll tell him your opinion. He will certainly be flattered. The 
old uncle, no doubt, shares it.” 

She hummed softly to herself as she wrote her note, and Aunt 
Emily counted her stitches with ostentatious vigor. Each was doubt- 
less playing a part, but the younger woman made the more success- 
ful actress of the two, as the elder was fain to acknowledge with 
secret dejection. 

“She will end,” thought the old lady, very sadly, “by becoming 
as heartless and worldly as she tries to make herself out now.” 

“ Shall I give the old gentleman your love, Aunt Emily ? You 
were great friends, if I remember rightly.” 

Pearl was ready dressed for her journey, waiting for the carriage 


A COLD HAND 


319 


which Mr. Lewis had promised to send for her. There was a cer- 
tain suppressed restlessness about her which betrayed that she was 
ill at ease with herself, and Aunt Emily’s soft brown eyes looked 
very wistful as they followed her many and capricious movements. 

“I wonder,” she said, gently, “if he will be as clear-sighted as 
ever? You must tell me what he says to you, Pearl. Somehow I 
can’t help thinking it will not be exactly what you want to hear.” 

“ I don’t want to hear that I’m the most fortunate woman in the 
whole world and ‘ greatly to be envied,’ and ‘ richly blessed,’ etcetera, 
for really that has been repeated to me ad nauseam,” 

“Besides,” observed her aunt, simply, “it isn’t true.” 

“ No, it isn’t true. I’m glad you have arrived at that conclusion. 
There’s the carriage.” 

She was gone a moment later, leaving her aunt to ruminate at 
will on the undeniable fact that marriage under certain conditions 
and for certain women is all but tantamount to suicide. 

Meanwhile, however, Pearl found that there were certain substan- 
tial benefits attached to her new condition which were not entirely 
to be despised. It was an agreeable change, for example, from her 
previous experience as a struggling musician, to be handed over at 
Charing Cross by an attentive footman to the tender mercies of an 
equally attentive guard — a gray-haired veteran, who treated Pearl 
very much as if she had been a princess in her own right, conducted 
her to an extremely comfortable coupb, and locked her in, with the 
respectful assurance that Mr. Lewis would join her at Cannon Street. 

After having tended for* herself for nearly a year, struggled into 
crowded omnibuses, and squeezed into third-class carriages under- 
ground, it was certainly not unpleasant to have everything done for 
her as of old, and to find herself once more in the luxurious sur- 
roundings to which her wealthy godmother had accustomed her. 

She was not a little amused, when the train steamed into Cannon 
Street a few minutes later, at the unconventional warmth of the 
greeting which there took place between Mr. Lewis and the gray- 
haired guard. 

“ Frazer has known me,” explained the banker, smiling, “ ever 
since I was ten years old. He took charge of me on my first journey 
to school, and I believe he still thinks I can hardly look after myself.” 

“ He has looked after me very kindly,” said Pearl, bestowing on 
the old Scotchman one of those consciously fascinating glances 
which, as a French writer once tersely put it, would “ damn a saint,” 
while they seldom fail to bewitch sinners. 


320 


THE PRICE OF A PEARL 


Both men were dazzled by it, and each for the sake of the 
other. 

“ The old gentleman will be pleased, sir, I’m thinking,” said the 
guard, with respectful significance. 

“ He is pleased, Frazer. Nothing has pleased him so much for a 
long time.” 

“ Well, I’m sure, sir, there’s many feel the same, and wish you 
long life and happiness, sir, and the young leddy too, if I may make 
so bold.” 

“Thank you, Frazer. We’ll have to go by this train again, I 
think — some other day /” 

“ I hope that ’ll be soon, sir, and that you’ll take a proper holi- 
day.” 

“ Every one is preaching that doctrine just at present,” observed 
Lewis, when he and Pearl had been left to their own devices. “ Even 
my dear old uncle. So I suppose I must be looking rather more 
like a scarecrow than usual.” 

“I have had a great deal of advice given me,” replied his be- 
trothed, demurely, “ as to the way I am to treat you. Some of your 
friends think, I believe, that you are marrying a giddy school-girl, 
and that I shall insist on your taking me to a ball every evening.” 

She talked a great deal of nonsense of this sort during the two 
hours’ journey down to St. Cuthbert’s, and listened to her own voice 
with a sort of dazed wonder, as if in truth it belonged to some other 
woman. It was by no means difficult to entertain her grave lover, 
and to bring smiles — albeit very flitting ones — to his sober counte- 
nance. 

He was content with very little at present. Perhaps, indeed, these 
were the brightest, because the most hopeful, days in his hitherto 
unsolaced existence. But how would it be later, when he should 
have found out, to his bitter cost, that the brightness had, after all, 
failed to herald any life-giving warmth — that his hopes were barren, 
and his devotion wholly wasted ? 

It was to stop her mental ears against such disquieting self-ques- 
tionings as these that Pearl so persistently “ tore up the silence ” 
whenever she found herself alone with Mr. Lewis. 

But it had been decreed that the inner voice of her conscience 
should speak to her in audible tones through the aged lips of a dy- 
ing man. The very first words Uncle Christopher uttered when his 
nephew placed her hand in his conveyed to her a sort of tacit ac- 
cusation which she knew not how to repel. 


A COLD HAND 


321 


“ This is a cold hand, Bat,” said the old man, looking first at it, 
then at her face, and then at his nephew, with the grave, discern i no- 
eyes of one who has learned to view all things belonging to time in 
the light of eternity. 

“ It is a cold day, sir, and she is just off a journey,” said Pearl’s 
lover, with a slightly deprecating smile. 

He laid his own hand, as he spoke, on that which still held hers 
in an almost vise-like clasp. 

“ And yours is a furnace,” exclaimed Uncle Christopher, with 
something like a start at the unexpected touch — “ a slow furnace ! 
How are flame and ice to go together?” 

The three hands dropped asunder at the strange question, and a 
cloud gathered on the face of the younger man. This was not the 
sort of greeting he had led Pearl to expect, and he could see that 
she was disconcerted. 

She had been, to a certain extent, prepared to find old Mr. Lewis 
failing in mind as well as in body. She knew that his memory was 
uncertain, and his talk sometimes disconnected ; that the past and 
present were curiously blended, and the future so near as to have 
lost all element of terror — in fact, as his nephew had lovingly ex- 
plained to her, the next world was so real to him that it was as if 
he were on its very threshold. 

But still she had expected that the faded eyes would be lighted 
up at sight of her, if only for the sake of his beloved Bat, whose 
happiness he had so long coveted and so warmly welcomed. 

And behold, instead of pleasure, she could read only foreboding 
in the old man’s gray, seer-like visage — a foreboding that turned her 
eyes inward on herself, and revealed to her, with lightning clear- 
ness, the nakedness of her own land. 

“ Speak to him, dearest,” whispered Bat, anxiously. “ Call him 
by his name.” 

Thus urged, Pearl again took the old man’s wasted hand in hers, 
and said, with her most winning smile : 

“ Are you not glad to see me, Uncle Christopher?” 

“ She has come a very long way, sir, to see you,” said Bat, half- 
reproachfully. 

His uncle’s silent scrutiny fretted him, though he could not quite 
have explained his own sentiments. 

“ Oh, aye !” assented Uncle Christopher, in the slow, dreamy tones 
of a somnambulist. “ Where are those things I had for her? Nurse 
Lois knows. Where is she, by-the-way ?” 

21 


322 


THE PRICE OF A PEARL 


“ Nurse Lois !” repeated Pearl, and her face paled visibly. “ You 
never told me she was here.” 

Lewis looked at her in astonishment. 

“Yes, dearest; don’t you remember? Miss Morton, as we call 
her here — I had forgotten her Christian name. Surely I explained 
in my letter?” 

“You mentioned Miss Morton — yes, of course. I beg your par- 
don.” But Pearl’s face was still strangely disturbed, and Lewis be- 
came more and more perplexed. 

“ Is this too much for you ?” he said, drawing her aside for a 
moment. “ The dear old man is not the least like himself to-day. 
I can’t think what ails him.” 

“ He wants you, or Nurse Lois, or somebody. He doesn’t want 
me, that’s evident,” and Pearl’s lips began to quiver painfully. 

“ Dearest, if you only knew how he was longing for you !” 

“ Well, he doesn’t think much of me now, and perhaps,” with a 
little catch in her breath that was nearly a sob, “ he’s right.” 

“Where are those things?” repeated Uncle Christopher, with 
the fretfulness of helpless old age. “ I want to give them to her 
myself.” 

“You mean ray mother’s jewels, sir, that you had made for her?” 

“ Aye ! She was ice, too — never would warm to me. Ice and 
flame, flame and ice. That’s how it was, my poor boy, and that’s 
how it will be.” 

“No, no, Uncle Kit. You’re dreaming of old days. That’s all 
changed now, and I’m the happiest man in the kingdom. Look, 
sir, this is mine,” and the younger Lewis took Pearl’s hand (the 
left one, this time, on which she wore the ring of her betrothal) 
and pressed it tenderly to his lips. 

“Does the heart go with it?” said the old man — oh, so solemnly ! 
Neither of them ever forgot the tone in which he uttered those few 
words. 

Pearl’s hand struggled faintly for its freedom, but the man on 
whom she had bestowed it held it in his own strong clasp, and an- 
swered firmly : 

“ Yes — it does — it will, and meanwhile I am satisfied.” 

“Let her speak for herself. Come here, child, and sit down be- 
side me. Aye ! she has a winsome face, and the eyes are very bright, 
but there is no warmth in them.” 

At that moment there was an expression of actual terror in them, 
and her lover nearly wrung his hands. 


A COLD HAND 


323 


“I wish to Heaven his nurse would come back. He doesn’t 
know in the least what he’s saying. I believe he takes you for my 
mother.” 

But Pearl knew better. The dying lips were telling her strange 
truths to which her own heart bore witness. The dying eyes were 
gifted with strange powers of vision. She could not have deceived 
them if she would. 

He turned his head presently, and called to his nephew. 

“Fetch me the things, Bat. You know where to find ’em. 
Down-stairs — in the safe.” 

“ Yes, go,” said Pearl, in answer to her lover’s doubtful glance, 
which seemed to ask how he could leave her. She had a sudden 
overwhelming longing to be alone with this dear old man and shrive 
herself in his confessional. 

“Are you happy, child?” he asked her, gravely, when his nephew 
had left the room. 

“ I ought to be happy ; he is so good to me. I will do every- 
thing I can, Uncle Christopher, to make him happy.” 

Uncle Christopher shook his head slowly and sadly, and the 
trance-like expression came back into his face. 

“ For such as us,” he murmured, dreamily, “ it will be best when 
there is no marrying and no giving in marriage.” 

“ Uncle Christopher, I didn’t deceive him. I have been honest 
with him. He knows I don’t love him.” 

No answer. She was not even sure if her words had reached his 
ears. 

They seemed closed for the moment to earthly sounds, and his 
eyes looked beyond her, with a strange light in them. 

She followed their regard, but to hers was vouchsafed only the 
everyday vision of a pale sunset glow that blended sea and sky to- 
gether into one faint shade of rose-color. 

He struggled feebly to his feet, and she helped him, supporting 
his slow, uncertain steps until he reached the window. There, lean- 
ing heavily on her slender shoulder, he stood looking out on the ter- 
raced gardens where he would never walk again, on the fair world 
that had ceased to exist for him, on the peaceful water where the 
sun’s departing rays had traced one dazzling gleam of gold. 

“ The gate of heaven !” she heard him murmur softly to himself, 
with a smile of ineffable rapture. 

“ Where is the lad ?” he asked her presently, looking about him 
vaguely, as if in search of some one. He seemed to have forgotten 


324 


THE PRICE OF A PEARL 


that his nephew was a gray-haired man, and Pearl felt her throat 
tighten. 

“ You sent him down, Uncle Christopher, to fetch something that 
you wanted. Don’t you remember?” 

“ Nay ! I don’t want anything except himself. I wish he’d come. 
Who’s that down in the garden ?” 

She looked, and a tide of jealous blood surged up into her face. 

“I think that must be — your nurse, Uncle Christopher. She 
has her hands full of flowers. Look, she is waving them at you.” 

“ Oh, aye ! I remember now. I sent her to fetch flowers for 
your grave.” 

Pearl started painfully. The word seemed like a portent, and 
she repeated it uneasily. 

“ Aye ! There are none in the garden. It is too early yet, so I 
bade her try the greenhouse. Bat said his wife was coming.” 

Pearl’s heart gave a leap within her of vague and nameless terror. 

u Dear Uncle Christopher, don’t you know me? It is I who am 
to be — your niece some day.” 

The door opened at that moment, and Nurse Lois came into the 
room. There was a pleased smile of recognition on her face as she 
approached the window, but it froze into a look of horrified dismay 
when her eyes fell upon her patient. 

“ How long has he been like this ? He was quite well when I 
left him. Where is his nephew ? Help me, please, to get him back 
to his chair.” 

Pearl obeyed mechanically, and the nurse tore furiously at the bell. 

“ I had better fetch — my — Mr. — Lewis,” said Pearl, trembling 
like an aspen leaf at the touch of the old man’s icy hand. 

“ Yes — send him up. Don’t come back. It will only harrow 
you. This is the end.” 

The end, or the beginning ? Which ? Pearl turned back for a 
moment before she left the room, and she felt that, though he was 
still breathing, she had looked on death. 

Half an hour later Bartholomew came down to look for her in 
the dining-room. It was nearly dark now. The sunset glow was 
all gone, and through the shadowy twilight he could just discern 
her shrinking figure as she sat crouched upon the sofa. 

“ My poor child,” he said, sadly, “ I have brought you to a house 
of mourning.” And he groped his way across the darkening room 
with the slow, cautious step of a purblind man. 


A COLD HAND 


325 


He sat down beside her, and would have taken her into his arms, 
but she shrank away from him, and buried her face in the cushions. 
He thought that she was weeping, and tried to comfort her. 

“Don’t cry, Pearl. He wouldn’t wish you to shed a tear for 
him. He looks so happy.” 

Her answer chilled him to the heart. 

“ Those eyes !” she whispered, still shrinking from his touch. 
“ I’m frightened. They follow me about everywhere.” 

“ What eyes, dearest ? I don’t understand you.” But even as 
the words left his mouth it dawned upon him what she meant, and 
he was conscious of a sort of ghostly presence looking down upon 
himself and her from the wall above the mantel-piece. 

It was the picture of his dead wife. In this dim, uncertain light 
it seemed like a reproachful phantom, and he got up with something 
of a shiver from his place beside Pearl. 

It was many years since he had lifted his eyes to that picture, 
but he remembered the face well, faultless in form and feature, yet 
empty of all that makes beauty more than skin-deep. Why should 
it have power to haunt the woman whose sway over his life was 
absolutely undivided? 

After a moment’s silence he gently blamed her foolish fancy. 

“ Why should you be jealous of my past, when you know that 
the present and the future are wholly yours? It isn’t worthy of 
you, dearest. Unless you want to torture me, never let us speak 
of this again.” 

“ I was not — jealous,” faltered Pearl. 

Alas, how could she tell him of the likeness she had seen, which 
he never once thought of, for which she herself could not account? 
How could she admit that the eyes which followed her so persist- 
ently about the room were not those of his dead wife, but of the only 
man whom she had ever really cared for? She could not tell him. 
He must think her jealous if he would. 

“ If you would rather not remember that another woman once 
called me husband, be it so. I will put this away, as I did the 
other. I am all yours, Pearl, and — and — I have no one but you 
now.” 

She would have been less than human then if she had not drawn 
to him in his great sorrow, and mingled her tears with his. But 
even in that solemn moment when he held her in his arms, he knew 
— they both knew — that his uncle’s dying words were true : it was 
a cold hand she had bestowed on him, and the heart did not go with it. 


CHAPTER V 


THE NIGHT BEFORE 

“And I can do nothing, pray perhaps: 

But somehow the world pursues its game, 

If I pray, if I curse, for better or worse: 

And my faith is torn to a thousand scraps, 

And my heart feels ice while my words breathe flame.” 

“ It is not considered lucky to put off a wedding once, and you 
know Miss Merry weather’s has been put off twice.” 

To judge by Lady Lowick’s manner as she delivered herself of this 
remark one might fairly suppose that Miss Merry weather’s prospective 
ill-luck did not greatly afflict her. 

She was standing at the open door of her own magnificent suite of 
reception-rooms, a much befrizzled and bejewelled woman, and over- 
heated to boot, for the night was sultry, and it takes a great deal of 
high breeding and delicate nurture to look cool when one has to re- 
ceive about five hundred guests and say something civil or insincere 
or impertinent to most of them. 

But though Lady Lowick could never “stand at ease,” either in 
her own house or anywhere else, she was at this moment a very tri- 
umphant individual, for had not Lord Glendown himself honored 
her with his presence, and might not his long form be seen slanting 
towards her with an air of languid amusement by all such as loved 
to speculate upon his fads and fancies? 

“ Bertie likes me,” so Lady Lowick was wont to assure her ac- 
quaintances, “ because I slate the people so.” 

Her satisfaction this evening was all the more undisguised because 
Lord Glendown had only just reappeared in London society, after a 
prolonged stay on the Continent which had puzzled even his nearest 
relations. 

That he should show himself in public for the first time at her big 
reception was therefore a source of just pride to Lady Lowick, and she 
testified her very natural feelings by keeping him a close prisoner in 
the face of the assembled multitude. His passive non-resistance under 


THE NIGHT BEFORE 


327 


circumstances when he was usually more than restive she interpreted to 
herself in the most flattering light possible, and, led on by his good- 
humored squint, she imparted to him all the choice scandal she could 
think of, asking finally if he intended to go to see the wedding next 
day ; “ that is to say,” she added, meaningly, “ if it is not put off for 
the third time, and I shouldn’t be surprised if it was.” 

“ What wedding?” asked Lord Glendown, stifling a yawn with 
only partial success, for it contrived to express itself, in spite of him, 
at the corners of his eyes and month. 

“ Miss Merry weather’s. She is to be married to-morrow at St. 
Basil’s.” 

“Thought that was over long ago; in fact, I half expected to 
meet her here to-night as Mrs. Lewis.” 

Lady Lowick expressed her amazement at such inconceivable igno- 
rance, and proceeded with more or less of her native venom to explain 
the situation. 

The marriage had been put off twice already. First the old man 
had died, very suddenly, in the act, indeed, people said, of blessing 
his future niece. “ And of course he was very rich, and everything 
went to his nephew, and there was an immense amount of business 
to be got through, and — ” 

“And presumably,” suggested Glendown, “both Mr. Lewis and 
Miss Merry weather had sufficient good feeling to put off their 
marriage.” 

“ Well, yes — no one could object to that, though there was no ex- 
act necessity, you know. He was very old and quite helpless, but 
still — of course — if they liked — ” 

“ You said the marriage was put off twice,” interposed Bertie, who 
seldom wasted time or strength in useless argument, thereby creating, 
however, not infrequently, the erroneous impression that he was of 
one mind with the speaker. 

“ Oh, then you know her aunt died, not the old woman she lives 
with now, but that odious old Lady Dairy mple — you must remem- 
ber her, surely? She went out of her mind about six years ago, and 
people said — ” 

“More than their prayers,” put in the incorrigible Bertie. “Never 
mind that now, Lady Lowick ; I can guess what they said.” 

“It was about that unfortunate affair, you know, when the 
brother — ” 

“ Yes, yes, but I want to hear about the sister. You’ll forgive me 
for interrupting you, Lady Lowick, but I’ve been pigging in the 


328 


THE PRICE OF A PEARL 


wilds of Brittany for the last three months, and manners were never 
my strong point, as you may remember.” 

“ I don’t know. I think it was very pretty of you to come here 
to-night. I could hardly believe my ears when your name was an- 
nounced.” 

“But about Miss Merry weather ? You were going to tell me — ” 

“Oh, well, she’s an heiress now. The old woman left her all her 
money. People said she would, you know, but then no one- ever 
knew whether she had made her will or not. And, of course, the 
property has been in chancery all this time. There must be nearly 
half a million altogether. The archdeacon gets the house in Fingall. 
I invited him here this evening, but he wouldn’t come.” 

“ No,” rejoined Glendown, rather dryly, “ I don’t suppose he would. 
Does his son get anything under the will ?” 

“ Nothing; but I suppose his sister will do something for him. In 
the meanwhile no one can find out where he is, or what he is doing. 
I should think myself it would be better not to inquire. That was 
a queer business, you know — about those sapphires.” 

“Very queer indeed,” echoed his eccentric lordship, in a tone of 
lurking satire. “ What does Mr. Lewis say ?” 

“ Oh, poor man, he’s infatuated. People said she wanted to be off 
her bargain when she came into all this money, for, of course, she 
never cared for him. But I suppose she thought matters had gone 
a little too far for that, and so the last thing I hear is that they’re 
to be married to-morrow, quite quietly, at St. Basil’s Church. No 
wedding-breakfast, no reception — nothing. So odd of them, isn’t it ?” 

“ Very sensible, I call it,” drawled Bertie. “ That’s the way I shall 
get married when the time comes.” 

“Dear me!” exclaimed Lady Lowick, very eagerly, “this is most 
interesting. When are we to be allowed to hear more? Are you 
really contemplating marriage, Lord Glendown ?” 

“ My people are contemplating it for me, and I am the most duti- 
ful of sons.” 

“ But — I suppose you’re going to make your own choice, are you 
not?” 

“ O Lord, no !” in a tone of lazy deprecation. “ That’s just what 
I can’t be bothered with. I leave the choice to my mother. She has 
a pretty fair notion of my tastes by this time.” 

“ I see you’re as fond of cracking jokes as ever.” Somewhat dubi- 
ously spoken. 

“This isn’t a joke, my dear lady. I’m in sober earnest. You 


THE NIGHT BEFORE 


329 


may expect to hear of my wedding- any day. I can’t promise to in- 
vite you to it, because I shall stipulate that the knot’s tied without 
any unnecessary fuss in the way of festivities, but you shall certain- 
ly have a piece of cake.” 

Lady Lowick’s shrill laugh was almost hysterical. 

“ And you expect me to believe, Lord Glendown, that the whole 
thing isn’t a fait accompli already ?” 

“ It’s so far from being a fait accompli ,” smiled Bertie, pleasantly, 
“ that I don’t even know the name of the young lady.” 

Lady Lowick plucked up heart of grace immediately. 

“You may — who knows — find her here to-night,” she suggested, 
more softly. 

“ I don’t think so. I can never tell one girl from another at these 
crowded parties. They all look to me as if they had been turned 
out by the gross.” 

“ Let me point out some of the pretty ones. I assure you there 
are some beauties here to-night.” 

“ Thanks, awfully, Lady Lowick. But you see I’ve left the whole 
thing to my mother now, and it won’t do for me to be poking about 
on my own hook.” 

“The duchess must be rather oppressed, I should think, by her 
responsibility.” 

“ Ob, dear me, no !” replied Bertie, reassuringly. “ She knows so 
exactly what I don't want. I’ve just made a few conditions in the 
matter, and then I leave the rest to her.” 

“ Including the courtship ?” inquired Lady Lowick, uncertain even 
now whether this extraordinary creature intended her to take him 
seriously. 

“ Well, if it was absolutely necessary, one could carry that on, 
don’t you know, by correspondence. There are books published, I 
believe, that help one to write a proper letter.” 

“ Why don’t you marry a milkmaid, Lord Glendown ?” 

Her ladyship looked more than flushed now. She was almost 
apoplectic. Bertie’s smile, on the other hand, was quite apologetic 
as he answered, humbly : 

“ Well, a fellow would like to be able to associate with his wife, 
don’t you know ? I think she must be a lady. And then, as I told 
my mother, I’d rather she didn’t squint, because it wouldn’t do for 
us both to be cross-eyed, and I’d as soon she was a decent height. 
Otherwise, people would call us the long and the short of it. Oh ! 
I’m sure to find some one." 


330 


THE PRICE OF A PEARL 


“ Or, perhaps,” suggested Lady Lowick, very tartly, “ she has 
found you already ?” 

It was impossible to believe that Lord Glendown had not chosen 
this roundabout way of announcing to her an engagement of which 
in all probability he now secretly repented. 

Little indeed did she know that he was telling her. the simple 
truth, and that he had closed an important conversation with his 
mother that very morning by saying, drearily : 

“ Any one that you like will do. I may be sure she will say her 
prayers and wear decent sleeves to her gown of an evening.” 

Cracked as Lady Lowick knew him to be — as cracked, indeed, as 
he could be and hold together — she would never have suspected him 
of such hopelessly irrational requirements as these. In answer to 
her charge, he replied, gravely : 

“ There would hardly have been time yet,” looking at his watch at 
the same moment, as if in confirmation of this opinion. 

“You’re not going yet? You haven’t been here half an hour.” 

“ Well, I didn’t look at the time when I came in, but you’ve told 
me such a lot of awfully interesting things, Lady Lowick, that I feel 
as if I’d been here for hours.” 

She let him go after that, and confided to a good many people, in 
the course of the evening, her conviction that that “poor young man” 
was going off his head. He had evidently got into some disastrous 
entanglement while he was lying perdu on the Continent, and it was 
really very unfortunate for the dear duke and duchess, but no doubt 
they would pass it off as harmless eccentricity. 

Meanwhile, the “ poor young man ” in question, somewhat exhaust- 
ed by the farce he had been playing for her ladyship’s benefit, was 
strolling quietly down to his club, a prey to the bitterest thoughts 
that had ever yet assailed his shrinking, sensitive spirit. The utter 
futility of all human experience, its unmeaning sorrows, its unreason- 
ing joys, its blind yet tyrannous passions, its shadowy hopes, its 
baseless visions — all this was translated for him into the one brief 
pertinent fact that the woman whom he worshipped was going on 
the morrow to marry the wrong man. 

He was in a world of shadows, flying phantoms that chased each 
other into an abyss of nothingness, and of those shadows he himself 
was one, and in that aimless chase he had spent his empty days. 
How should it end except in outer darkness? 

Such were the thoughts that haunted him, that at one time or 
another in our lives have power to haunt most of us. Not more, 


THE NIGHT BEFORE 


331 


perhaps, than shadows themselves, but black and ghost-like and able 
to shut out the blessed sun. 

He met with plenty of fellow-ghosts in the course of that noctur- 
nal stroll along Piccadilly, some rich, some poor, some old, some 
young, but as it seemed to him all wretched because, being capable 
of “ conceiving the circle,” they were “ content to walk the square.” 

“ And a very pitiful square it is too, with most of us,” he mur- 
mured to himself, as he finally 7, turned his back to the crowd, and 
crossed over to one of the side streets leading in the direction of 
Mayfair. 

The tones of a familiar voice, albeit not addressed to himself, 
brought his long swinging limbs to a sudden halt in front of a well- 
known private hotel. 

At the door stood a couple of men, one elderly, the other middle- 
aged, both parsons; but the gray -haired clergyman was likewise a 
dignitary of the Church, as his irreproachable calves bore witness, 
and Bertie recognized the whilom Archdeacon of Fingall, otherwise 
known as Dr. Merryweather. 

“ To-morrow at three,” he was saying, in the brisk professional 
tones which the young man so well remembered as characteristic of 
Pearl’s father. “ St. Basil’s Church, close to the hospital. Dear me,” 
as Bertie advanced, and held out a hand of greeting, “ I ought to 
know your name, Pm sure ! Your face is very familiar to me. Let 
me see. Did I examine you for ordination ?” 

“ No, sir ; but I was a sort of lay-curate at one time in your par- 
ish, and your daughter used to know me pretty well as Bertie Mere- 
dith.” 

“ Of course, of course. I remember you quite well now. She’s 
going to be married, you know — to-morrow. A very constant lover 
she has, too, in Mr. Lewis. My friend here is to tie the knot. I hope 
you have no objection ?” 

“ Too late to say so if I have,” replied Bertie, with one of his easy- 
going smiles. 

“ Because you and my daughter were very good friends, if I re- 
member rightly. You must come up-stairs and see her. Oh, dear, 
yes ; it’s not late. She won’t be going to bed for another hour. 
Oh, yes, you must come up — certainly you must. I’ll take no de- 
nial.” 

Apparently the archdeacon had his old incapacity for grasping a 
situation. He turned a deaf ear to all remonstrances, bade a final 
good-bye to his clerical friend, and marched Bertie up-stairs with 


332 


THE PRICE OF A PEARL 


that cheerful irresponsibility of manner and hopelessly impersonal 
benevolence which can alienate sensitive affections more fatally and 
more completely than either positive unkindness or cold indiffer- 
ence. 

“ Pearl, my dear,” he began, pleasantly. “ Where is she ? She 
Avas here just now.” * 

There were two large rooms divided by folding-doors. She had 
gone into the farther one, and for one brief moment Bertie saw her 
without being seen. He noted the exquisite unstudied grace of her 
movements which had never failed subtly to intoxicate his fastidious 
senses; he observed, too, the unconscious weariness of her step, the 
listless droop of her shoulders; and then she turned and faced him, 
and if he had ever seen reproach and dismay and confusion and dis- 
pleasure blended in the self-same human countenance, he saw it now 
in hers. 

Almost involuntarily he recoiled at the sight, and began a halting 
apology. It was cut short, however, with cheery good-will by Dr. 
Merry weather. 

“I have brought up an old friend, my dear, to offer his congratu- 
lations. I haven’t been indiscreet, have I? It’s not a case of getting 
up early to-morrow. Special license, you know,” turning to Bertie. 
“Very quiet, and all that sort of thing; but we won’t turn you out 
if you like to come and look on — eh, Pearl ?” 

What Pearl answered, or whether she answered anything, Bertie 
never knew. All he did know was that her fingers just touched 
his own, and that her eyes, bright and hard as a green iceberg, 
seemed to ask him why he was there and what he expected to 
. find. 

Again his stammering tongue essayed some excuse for his pres- 
ence. 

“ Your father insisted on my coming up — I — really did my best 
— to — well, of course — it’s late in the day to — ” 

Having floundered as far as this, and being unwilling to utter any 
falsehoods, Bertie paused, up to his neck in awkward embarrassment, 
and looked imploringly at his host. The sight that met his eyes was 
curiously familiar. Pearl had been used to it from her youth up. At 
whatever hour she approached her father he seemed to her to be al- 
ways reading his letters. 

And so it was now. A good-sized pile had come in by the last 
post which the presence of his clerical friend had obliged him to put 
aside unread ; but he was already making up for lost time, and evi- 


THE NIGHT BEFORE 


333 


dently trusted to his daughter to entertain Lord Glendown. Her lips 
curled ever so slightly as she motioned the unwelcome visitor to a 
seat. 

“Am I not keeping you up ? It is rather late, I fear. Please send 
me away, Miss Merry weather.” 

“ You’re not keeping me up. I have no intention of going to bed 
at present.” 

“ I didn’t know till this evening that — I mean, I was fully under 
the impression that — you were already married.” 

“Yes?” 

“ I was surprised, of course.” 

“ Every one has expressed surprise. I don’t quite see why, my- 
self.” 

Pearl spoke with a cold hauteur that contrasted strangely with 
the bewitching gentleness she had shown to him on a former oc- 
casion. What had he done in the interval ? or what had she done 
herself ? 

After a moment’s pause, he said, abruptly : 

“ Why the rest of the world should be surprised I can’t say, but 
I can answer for myself. When I last met you, you were very 
anxious to avoid the man whose name you’re going to take to- 
morrow.” 

“ When I last met you, you told me what was not true.” 

His daring challenge had been taken up with a promptitude no 
whit less daring, and for a few moments he was so astounded that 
he could scarcely believe he had heard correctly. Dr. Merryweather, 
meanwhile, rustled his papers with spasmodic energy, frowned over 
his spectacles at a long list of figures, shook his head impressively at 
some invisible adversary, and finally adjourned to the next room, 
where his busy pen was to be heard a minute later scratching across 
the paper at lightning speed. 

“Perhaps you wouldn’t mind explaining,” said Bertie, less feebly 
than might have been expected, considering his utter stupefaction. 
“ I’m not generally given to lying, except to people like Lady Lo- 
wick, and they are fair game.” 

“Lord Glendown, there is absolutely nothing to explain, and I 
have no doubt you meant what you said to me that evening; but 
you were misinformed, I suppose. At all events, it was quite un- 
necessary to urge me to sing at St. Basil’s on the ground of giving 
pleasure to — any one.” 

“ Pardon me ! You gave very great pleasure to one person, 


334 


THE PRICE OF A PEARL 


though he was not fortunate enough to be present. Wait, please,” 
as Pearl was beginning a scornful rejoinder. “ I’m not alluding to 
myself. If you will kindly read this note, written, as you may per- 
ceive, on board ship, you will understand that, whether you intended 
it or not, you did give pleasure to one poor wretch, and so much the 
worse for him !” 

He took a folded sheet of foreign paper from his pocket-book as 
he spoke, laid it before her, and then turned away. There are those 
who can look on with perfect coolness at the sight of mental an- 
guish, but he was not one of them. He knew without looking 
when she began and when she ended, and precisely at the right 
moment stretched out his hand for the letter. But to his surprise 
her cheek was not ashy, as he had expected, but flaming with a fierce 
color which it seldom wore. 

“Your friend has not taken you into his entire confidence,” she 
said, with a contemptuous anger that her next words explained. 
“ You are not aware, evidently, that he is engaged to be married to 
one of the nurses at St. Basil’s. As it happens, I am, and so a let- 
ter like this strikes me as being — well, just a little absurd and out of 
place.” 

“ Engaged ?” repeated Bertie. “ Who says so? Not the nurse her- 
self, I’ll swear.” 

Pearl shrugged her shoulders. 

“ It seems to be common property at the hospital. The matron 
made no secret of it. I was shown their photographs, and of course 
there’s absolutely no reason why he shouldn't be engaged — only 
that — ” 

“Only that he isn’t,” interrupted Bertie, with almost brutal can- 
dor. 

“ Surely, Lord Glendown, we needn’t discuss the subject any 
further. I should not have mentioned it if you hadn’t chosen to 
make a very pointed allusion to what passed between us the last 
time I had the pleasure of meeting you.” 

“ I remember every word that passed between us on that occasion. 
You treated me as your friend then. Why do you count me as your 
enemy now ?” 

Was it a dream, or were he and Pearl really glaring at each other 
like implacable foes on the night before her marriage with another 
man ? 

Bertie had time to put this question to himself before she re- 
peated, frigidly : 


THE NIGHT BEFORE 


335 


“ I see no necessity to discuss the subject any further.” 

“ Unless you absolutely show me the door, I insist on discussing 
it. You are under a complete misapprehension. If what you are 
going to do to-morrow afternoon is to be done under that misappre- 
hension, the sooner I deliver my soul the better.” 

“ There is no misapprehension at all. I made no mistake. They 
will tell you at the hospital what I have told you to-night. And if 
that were not enough — I have eyes, and I can see. I was with 
Nurse Lois a few weeks ago when she received a letter from your 
friend. If I had any doubt before, I had none then.” 

“ Doubt of what ?” asked Bertie, incisively ; “ of her feelings, or 
of his? Remember, please, that I only answer for his.” 

“Then I am to understand that your friend is given to amusing 
himself? Poor Nurse Lois! I think somebody had better tell 
her.” 

Bertie’s eyes were almost blazing as he rose from his seat. 

“ Miss Merry weather, I agree with you. We have talked long 
enough. Let me congratulate you sincerely on your altered fort- 
unes^ Miss Margaret Wetherall, I presume, exists no longer, and 
Miss Merryweather won’t exist after to-morrow. May I wish Mrs. 
Lewis every possible happiness?” 

Pearl’s sole answer was “Good-night.” She did not offer him 
her hand, only bowed with cold courtesy as he turned to leave the 
room. 

At the door her low, clear voice arrested him. 

“ Lord Glendown !” 

“Yes.” 

He threw the word at her across his crooked shoulder. 

“ You have left something behind you.” 

“ I have left my faith in your sex behind me, but that doesn’t 
signify.” 

“You have left your friend’s letter behind you.” 

“It doesn’t concern me any longer, Miss Merryweather. Pray 
put it into the waste-paper basket. I noticed one in the other room 
as we came through.” 

An infinitesimal pause, as if he waited for some crushing retort, 
but it came not. He closed the door softly after him, and went 
down - stairs. The shadows were very black that night, and the 
chase very fast and furious, in her soul as well as his. It was a 
bitter vigil that she kept for to-morrow’s festival. 


CHAPTER VI 


THE DAY AFTER 

“ I have a message — I have more to say ; 

Shall Sorrow win His pity, and not Sin — 

That burden ten times heavier to be borne 

The next day, impelled doubtless by that curious tendency in 
human nature to press the sword-point against its own breast which 
distinguishes man from the lower animals, Lord Glendown repaired 
to the church of St. Basil for no other purpose than to make him- 
self thoroughly unhappy. 

It was a remarkably ugly building, Hanoverian in date as also in 
its internal arrangements, which were of the square pew and red- 
cushion type, and savored of an extinct ecclesiastical era. 

Not a house of God by any means, scarcely even a house of 
prayer, though prayers were doubtless said there every Sunday, and 
sacraments administered to a small and exclusive congregation. 

To poor Bertie it seemed more like a registrar’s office than any- 
thing else, and the marriage which he was about to witness hardly 
more sacred than a civil contract. He crept into a remote pew 
under the gallery, and there awaited, as an unbidden guest, the ar- 
rival of the two persons to be joined together in holy matrimony. 

It was to be a quiet wedding, as he knew, but there are always a 
certain number of individuals — masculine and feminine — who man- 
age somehow to get wind of even the most obscure and private 
nuptials, and these had found their way here to-day. 

Bertie could not reasonably resent their presence. What right 
had he, more than they, to come and look on at a ceremony which 
concerned neither himself nor them ? 

The minutes crept on ; there was a slight stir at the chancel end, 
some coming and going of officiating parson and officious beadle, 
then a crisp rustle of silk skirts in the outside passage, a little whis- 
pering among the self-invited congregation, and Dr. Merry weather, 
with an air of evident bewilderment, walked alone up the carpeted 
nave, oblivious for once in his life of his own personal dignity. 


THE DAY AFTER 337 

Where was the bridegroom ? Where was the best man ? No 
one had seen either, and the clock was on the stroke of three. 

Bertie looked uneasily at his watch, and cowered like a culprit 
behind his pillar. He felt as one feels in mid-ocean, when some- 
thing goes wrong with the machinery and the screws stop working. 
The motion may indeed be sickening, but it is as nothing compared 
to the torture of enforced inaction, and the dizzy swing of the dis- 
abled vessel. 

Surely the world was coming to an end if Bartholomew Lewis 
was not punctual ! Who had ever known the man to break his 
word, or fail in keeping his appointment? 

Apparently his expectant bride had no misgivings, for after a few 
moments she suffered herself to be led to her place by her father, 
Mrs. Fursden following more slowly on the arm of an elderly gen- 
tleman, whom Bertie recognized as Mr. Donaldson. 

A few other spectators straggled in at intervals, dividing their 
gaping glances between the little group at the chancel steps and 
the open door, before which a crowd was already gathering, as if in 
anticipation of some startling event or thrilling disclosure. 

And still the bridegroom came not, and Bertie’s heart began to 
sink within him, especially when heads were seen in close confabu- 
lation, and whispers rose in the church like the chilly shivering of 
aspen leaves, and Pearl presently left her place before the altar, and 
sat down in a distant corner, apart even from her own people. 

Bertie got up at last and went outside, but only to exchange the 
whispering comments going on within the building for a loud buzz 
on the pavement. The clock struck the quarter, and the handful of 
idle gapers had swelled into a regular mob by the time that Dr. 
Merryweather, his eyes distended and his lips apart, came out in 
search of a messenger. 

“Good heavens! you here!” he exclaimed, when he caught sight 
of his last night’s visitor. “This is a nice business, isn’t it? 
Never knew him before to be one moment behind time. What do 
you think can have happened ?” 

“ Something very serious, I should say, and you had better let 
me go, sir, and find out what it is.” 

“ But bless my soul, Glendown, I positively don’t know where to 
send you. He’s left his rooms— gave them up ten or twelve days 
a g 0 _ an d W ent to some hotel, I don’t know which. My daughter 
may, perhaps, but I declare — ’ 

Mr. Merry weather’s declaration, whatever it might have been, was 
22 


338 


THE PRICE OF A PEARL 


here cut short by the hurried advent of a hansom, which pulled up 
very sharply in front of the church. 

Its solitary occupant — a perfect stranger both to Pearl’s father 
and to Bertie — shot himself out on to the stone steps, and asked 
anxiously if this was St. Basil’s. 

A dozen voices answered yes, and asked him what had happened. 

“ I couldn’t remember the name. Had to go round to the bank 
to ask, and there they kept me. It’s an awful business. He’s all 
but killed.” 

“ Good God ! what do you mean ? What has happened ?” cried 
Dr. Merry weather. 

“ He mistook the door,” explained the stranger, in a hurried 
whisper — “at least, that’s what they think must have happened; 
opened the wrong one, and fell through — the lift-door, you under- 
stand, instead of his own.” 

Both men exclaimed aloud in horror, and the dreadful story was 
passed round in various notes among the crowd. 

“ He was to have called for me, and I waited some time,” pursued 
this unknown “ friend of the bridegroom,” who was the bearer of 
such fearful tidings to the bride. “ When he didn’t come, I went 
round to his hotel, and there — ” He stopped, and shuddered visibly. 

“ Which floor ?” asked Bertie, aghast at the mental vision that 
his quick imagination had already called up. 

“ The third.” 

“ The third ! Great Heaven ! How can he be alive?” 

“ For God’s sake, Glendown, go in, and break it to her as gently 
as you can !” implored Pearl’s father, in helpless dismay. “ I don’t 
know what to say to her.” 

In that strange avowal lay the secret, perhaps, of the girl’s mistakes 
and the woman’s bitterness. He to whom she had the best right 
to look for counsel had indeed never known what to say to her. 
Was it only the irony of fate, or was it rather the decree of Provi- 
dence, which deputed poor Bertie, of all people in the world, to go 
upon this mournful errand ? 

And was it only last night that he had parted from her in that 
white-heat of anger which implies white-heat of love? Ah, well! 
The hand of God was laid upon her now. Who should dare to 
blame or judge or condemn in His tribunal ? 

He went into the church to look for her with a compassion that 
was almost reverence. It might have been a woman, a very loving, 
very gentle woman, who led her tenderly aside, away from prying 


THE DAY AFTER 


339 


eyes and curious ears, and told her what had happened. She heard 
him in perfect silence. So absolutely stony was her face, so fixed 
her eyes, that he felt uncertain at first whether she had really under- 
stood him. 

“You will let me take you home,” he pleaded. “Your father 
will go — and see what can be done.” 

“ I must go myself. I have the best right.” 

She scarcely articulated these words, so stiff and bloodless were 
her lips ; but he heard them, and his heart ached for her. 

“ No one has a better right, but — you don’t perhaps realize what 
awaits you.” 

“ He isn’t dead ?” with a sudden keen glance of awakened sus- 
picion. 

Bertie shook his head sadly. 

must go to him,” she repeated. “ He has no one else.” 

“ Miss Merry weather, he won’t know you, he doesn’t know any 
one. Perhaps — I can’t bear to grieve you, but it might be better 
that — he never should know any one again.” 

“ Where is my father? Send him to me, please, and take my 
poor aunt home.” 

“ You will let me take you both home ? Afterwards, if you still 
insist — ” He stopped, alarmed at the ashy whiteness which had 
overspread her face. 

Gently he forced her to sit down, and drew off her long gloves. 

“ My doing, my doing,” she whispered, faintly ; and to his dying 
day he never forgot the agonized expression of those eyes which 
last night had looked so hard and glittering. 

“Hush !” he said, soothingly. “You don’t know what you are 
saying. No one in the world could think it was your doing. It 
was his terrible shortness of sight that brought about the accident, 
that and the culpable carelessness of the people at the hotel. You 
understand that, don’t you ? This is an accident, a fearful accident , 
but God forbid you should fancy it was anything else !” 

He waited anxiously for some word, or even look of response, for 
it seemed to him that her reason was all but unhinged, otherwise 
why should she have accused herself for what had happened ? 

But she only put her hand before her eyes as if to shut out some 
dreadful vision, and again to his unspeakable dismay he heard her 
murmur to herself, “ My doing, mine.” 

All that followed was like a nightmare to every one concerned. 
The church was cleared somehow, by what means or by whose orders 


340 


THE PRICE OF A PEARL 


Bertie never knew. The plebeian crowd outside melted gradually 
away. A carriage appeared from somewhere, and Pearl was put 
into it, the others looking at her with that awed pity which is so 
helpless to give comfort, so powerless to remove the dreadful sense 
of isolation felt by those who are its objects. Her aunt followed 
her. Bertie shut them both in, and then glanced anxiously at. Mrs. 
Fursden. To his amazement Pearl bent forward, fixed her eyes im- 
ploringly on his, and said, piteously : 

“ Take me there” 

“ Miss Merryweather, let me speak to your father. He is going, 
I know, and I will go too, if that will be any comfort to you, and 
come and tell you later all that I may hear. But don’t go yourself 
— yet. It would only be cruel — to you both.” 

“I must be cruel to myself. I must go to him. You would say 
so, if you knew.” 

“He would not say so if he knew. And you must not go now. 
Promise me you will not, until I give you leave. You know that 
you may trust me.” 

“ There is something I must tell you, and then you will let me 
go. I’m sure you will,, and I would rather you knew than any one 
else.” 

Again he asked himself, in silent terror, was her reason giving 
way ? And in Mrs. Fursden’s face he read a similar misgiving. 

“ Shall I come with you now ?” he said, looking from one to the 
other with a gentle searching glauce. They loved each other well, 
he knew, but did they understand each other? He felt a kind of 
pathetic surprise at the eagerness with which both of them in the 
same breath closed with this offer. 

Could he, then, really help or soothe or comfort any one in this 
griefful world, let alone the one who represented to him all that 
made life desirable? Was it true that she wanted him, asked him to 
go with her, hear what she had to say ? 

He knew not whether it was the most bitter or the most sweet 
moment of his whole life when, in obedience to her pleading eyes, 
he got into the carriage and took his place opposite her. Many eyes 
followed him with a look of undisguised amazement when the drive 
was ended, and he and Pearl passed on together to the rooms where 
he had, as he told her so bitterly, left behind him all his faith in her 
sex. At this hotel, where she had spent the past few weeks of her 
life, they knew enough about her to be aware that he was not the 
bridegroom. 


THE DAY AFTER 


341 


Bat of what they said or thought she reeked nothing. It was no 
dread of man’s judgments concerning her conduct or her fate that had 
petrified her whole being with a misery which made Bertie shudder. 

She shut the door behind her, and looked at him for some mo- 
ments in perfect silence. 

“I told you it was my doing,” she said, at last, in the same all 
but inaudible whisper that had breathed itself into his ears at the 
church a little while before. 

“And I tell you that you are doing him a cruel wrong in saying 
so,” he answered, firmly. “ There is no suspicion of suicide. Every 
one knows — ” 

She stopped him with a gesture worthy of a queen. 

“ I said nothing of suicide. You don’t understand. It is my do- 
ingT not his.” 

“ I don’t understand,” repeated Bertie, very humbly. 

“ Listen to me. You must try to understand, for no one else will. 
You know I put it off — this marriage? You heard that?” 

“ I heard that he had put it off — after his uncle’s death.” 

“Yes — yes — that was nothing. It was afterwards, when Aunt 
Cecilia died. I put it off then, and — it was not for love of her.” 
She felt Bertie’s wondering gaze upon her, though she would not 
meet his eyes, and she went on, in a low, hurried whisper, “ I needn’t 
have put it off. Every one said that. She had been as good as dead 
all these years. It was not for love of her.” 

“No,” said Bertie, very sadly. “I understand that it was not for 
love of her.” 

“ Perhaps if he had urged me more I might have given way. But 
— he was very patient. He said — as he had waited so long — he 
could — go on waiting a little longer. He thought that — I respected 
my aunt’s memory — especially as she had left me nearly all her 
money. I couldn’t let him know — that I was glad of any excuse 
for delay — ” 

Pause, in which poor Bertie felt that heaviest of all burdens — vi- 
carious suffering for a sin in which he had no share. No one but 
herself could break the silence. He felt that any word from him, 
however tender, would have been almost a profanity, and waited 
patiently until she spoke again. 

“If I had not delayed, this would not have happened. No one 
else will believe that, but I know it. He would have been in his own 
rooms still, where he was at home — and there were no stairs. I have 
been there— I think he was sorry to give them up— even— ” 


342 


THE PRICE OF A PEARL 


“Even for me” was in her mind to say, but she left the words 
unuttered. Bertie’s eyes were still fastened on hers with an ago- 
nized attention. 

“ Some one took them a fortnight ago, and wanted them at once. 
He didn’t like to be the cause of any inconvenience, and so he gave 
them up — sooner than he need — and went to this place, which I 
know he hated. And, oh! the dreadful thing is — that it nearly 
happened once before. He was so blind, he used to have to go quite 
close up to the door — like this ” — unconsciously she reproduced the 
purblind gesture — “to look at the number. Once he opened the 
lift door, but there was some one there to set him right. I think he 
spoke about its being left unlocked.” 

Again she was silent, but he knew there was more to come. The 
love he had borne her for so many years in vain gave him strange 
prescience, gave her strange trust. 

She had tried to shrive herself to old Uncle Christopher, but the 
confessor she chose then was too near heaven to understand what 
she would say to him. This man, who was chained down to earth 
by his great passion for herself, could better follow her in her halt- 
ing confession, could better divine the nature of her secret plague- 
spot. God’s laws may be broken many times in the spirit by those 
who dare not break them in the letter. There are murderers who 
have never shed a drop of blood, and such blood-guiltiness he felt 
was on her soul to-day. 

It might have been minutes, but it seemed like hours before she 
could trust her voice again. 

“ When you came to me at the church door this afternoon, and 
began to tell me what had happened, I saw it all as if I had been 
there. I think the devil showed it to me. He had shown it to me 
once before.” 

“ Once before ?” repeated Bertie, in amazement. 

“I had — I had imagined once — that such a thing might happen. 
It went through me like a sort of flash. I — I — let myself think 
once or twice— how it would be — if I were set free. I could not set 
myself free.” 

“ Poor child ! Poor child !” he said, and there was infinite com- 
passion in his voice. 

She knew that he understood her. There was no other human 
being in the world who would not have received her broken confes- 
sion as the raving of a disordered brain. To the kindest friend she 
had, her penitence would only have seemed exaggerated and unreal, 


THE DAY AFTER 


343 


her self-condemnation morbid and unnatural. But not so to this 
man. Perhaps, because he had also fought those battles whose only 
ground is the human heart, with those foes that are not “ flesh and 
blood,” but “ principalities and powers.” Had he too, then, been 
worsted in such struggles that he should find no word of reproach 
for her now ? only look at her with sad yearning eyes, as if he fain 
would bear her burden for her, and repeat again in tender pity : 

“ Poor child ! God comfort you !” 

She did not know it — it would not have been well that she should 
know it — but perhaps he had never loved her more dearly than in 
that bitter moment of self-searching shame. The only thing really 
worthy of love in man, woman, or child is that which makes them 
capable of repentance. Such capacity he had always recognized in 
her through all her grievous faults of disposition, and it was perhaps 
the secret of his inextinguishable passion. He knew the worst of 
her indeed ; but better than any one else on earth, better by far than 
either of her other lovers, did this strange lover know the best. 

“You understand now why I said that it was — my doing?” 

“ It is not your doing, but there was no way left perhaps of show- 
ing you — ” He paused for a moment or two, and bit his lip. 

To a man like him, it is always agony to reveal the depths of his 
soul. Yet only so, he knew, could he help her, and she wanted his 
help. 

“ I don’t know how to put it, but perhaps you’ll understand me. 
It’s an awful moment in one’s life when one finds out for the first 
time how black one’s own heart is. I know it was in mine, I see it 
is in yours. But one has to find out something else too, and I be- 
lieve you will.” 

Is it only the ordained priest who has the right to pronounce ab- 
solution — to loose on earth that which is loosed in heaven, or con- 
trariwise to shut the door on hope, and retain the sinner’s sin ? I 
know not, but every now and then a soul has found strange healing 
through some such gentle touch as this, administered by one on 
whose head the bishop’s consecrating hand has never rested. It was 
so with Pearl to-day; she had indeed seen into the black depths of 
her own heart, but below these she began dimly to understand that 
divine pity which “ means crowned, not vanquished, when it says 
forgiven.” 


CHAPTER VII 


THE SAME DAY 

“ . . . en m6me temps de glace et de flamme 
La haine dans l’ame, 

L’amour dans les yeux.” 

“ Now, Johnny, Johnny, what have I told you ? If you come to 
see me so late as this, people will talk, and I shall be compromised.” 

Mrs. Mandeville’s manner contradicted her words. She was lying 
in a very graceful and coquettish attitude on a low couch draped 
with delicate amber silk and luxuriously cushioned with fat, flounced 
pillows of the same color. Some people there were who wondered 
how she could afford herself such costly quarters in the heart of Bel- 
gravia. Others did not wonder at all, for they could form a very 
shrewd guess who paid for them. And these perspicacious individ- 
uals would not have been greatly surprised to-night to see >that 
Johnny Watson entered the pretty toy drawing-room unannounced, 
and that he further dropped unasked into a low seat beside the 
couch, taking possession at the same time of the fair bejewelled 
hand which his hostess languidly extended to him. 

In answer to her admonition he gave a fatuous laugh, and said 
that the young woman down-stairs had not shut the door in his face, 
and so he supposed it was not too late to come up. 

“ Because you corrupt her with bribes, you naughty boy ! I 
know the sort of thing that goes on ! I shall have to send her away, 
and get a proper sort of spinster who will act as a dragon, and keep 
my door shut against bad people of both sexes.” 

“Are you very much troubled,” asked Johnny, with a freedom 
that spoke volumes for his esteem of Mrs. Mandeville, “ with visits 
from people of your own sex, Nina ?” 

“Your mother doesn’t come, if that’s what you mean. I think 
some one must have been making mischief while I was in India. 
And yet,” added Mrs. Mandeville, musingly, “ I should have thought 
it was such a very innocent and even laudable thing to go and see 
one’s own husband.” 


TIIE SAME DAY 


345 


“ Well, look here, you know, people do talk, and the mater has got 
hold of some stories about your having amused yourself a good deal 
on the way out. I’m sure I don’t know who first set ’em going.” 

“Do you believe them, Johnny?” very reproachfully, yet very 
gently spoken. 

Johnny shifted a little uneasily on his seat, for the glance that ac- 
companied the words was full of tender allurement as well as lan- 
guishing reproof. 

“ Of course fellows were bound to find you awfully fetching, and 
all that. I don’t see what there is to make a fuss about.” 

“ Is^it my fault,” sighed Mrs. Mandeville, “ that people will think 
poor little me worth running after? Of course poor Fred doesn’t 
think so, never did — or I should have been a happier woman. Do 
you suppose, Johnny, that I want your mother or any one else in the 
world to tell me that the right place for a wife is at her husband’s 
side?” 

“People talk an awful lot of rot about marriage,” opined Johnny, 
with some idea of administering comfort by this sapient observation. 

“ But if the husband literally won’t have the wife with him,” con- 
tinued this deeply-injured and cruelly-wronged victim to stern fem- 
inine censure, “then what is she to do? Will any one answer me 
that question, Johnny ? Am I expected to take the veil, or put on 
sackcloth, and wear ashes on my head ?” 

“ You’d fetch a fellow all round his hat, whatever you wore,” 
Johnny assured her, with perfect sincerity. 

“Ah, that’s the way you always try to put us off — with foolish 
flattery and silly compliments when we’re dying for a little love 1” 

Mrs. Mandeville’s voice quavered painfully ; the hand which 
Johnny had captured was torn from his imprisoning grasp and 
placed before her eyes to conceal the fact that these were not weep- 
ing, and she sobbed bitterly and unrestrainedly for some moments. 

“ It’s a beastly shame,” muttered Johnny, speaking unconscious 
truth, as fools are very apt to do. 

“ And when I think — (sob) — how nearly you — (sob) — failed me, 
Johnny, that time last spring — (sob) — how nearly Lord Glendown 
— (sob) — came between us — it does seem — (sob) — as if really life 
was not worth living ” (sob, sob, sob). 

“ He has come back,” almost whispered Johnny, with a frightened 
glance at the door, as if he rather expected to see Bertie’s long body 
appearing like a phantom to upbraid him with his faithlessness and 
folly. For had he not covenanted with that eccentric mentor, whose 


846 


THE PRICE OF A PEARL 


intercession with Lord Lowick had stood the erring prodigal in such 
good stead, that he would break once for all, and forever, with Mrs. 
Mandeville? 

Perhaps both of them had forgotten the solid possibility that Mrs. 
Mandeville might refuse to break with him. 

“ Come back ? Then I may say good-bye to you, my poor boy. 
He will not be satisfied, I know, until he has robbed me of my best 
friend.” 

“ No, no. I won’t leave you, Nina — on my soul, I won’t ; only I 
wish — ” He stopped abruptly, warned by certain familiar danger- 
signals that he had better express his wishes with the utmost cau- 
tion, if he did not intend to be let in for a regular scene. 

Her face was covered still by both hands, but the curious rigidity 
of the fingers was eloquent rather of anger than of sorrow — an anger, 
too, that might at any moment be visited upon himself. And Johnny 
dreaded anger as a puppy dreads whipping. 

“You wish — go on, please. You wish, perhaps, that I should 
leave you, that I should try Jo forget.” 

“ No; hang it all ! it’s not that; but if you’d explain to the fellow 
as you did to me, or else let me explain to him, don’t you know — 
about that stupid business.” 

Mrs. Mandeville forgot her part for the moment. She forgot that 
her tears were fictitious and her sobbing well-feigned, and turned a 
pair of flashing dry eyes upon her startled visitor. 

“Explain what? That I gave that poor wretched boy shelter for 
a couple of nights at the risk of my own good name, that I might 
spare his? He knows that I did, and he puts his own base inter- 
pretation on it. And you ask me to explain!" 

“ But you did to me,” urged Johnny, perplexed and almost stupe- 
fied by her sudden change of manner. 

He could have sworn she had been crying, and her eyelids were 
not even red ! 

“ To you , yes. Oh, what strange creatures men are ! How little 
they can read between the lines ! Is there another man in the world, 
Johnny, except yourself, who would not have understood what that 
explanation cost me, and — and — tried , at least, to make up to me?” 

“But I did understand,” urged Johnny, helplessly. 

“ No, you didn’t, and you don’t. But your friend, Lord Glen- 
down, would understand fast enough. He would think, if I did 
what you propose — shall I tell you what he would think ? — that I 
cared for him, Johnny; and — perhaps he would not be wrong.” 


THE SAME DAY 347 

“ Bat you don’t !” cried Johnny, with a sadden movement of 
idiotic suspicion. 

He never knew how nearly she had thrown one of the fat, frilled 
cushions at his head — his dunderhead, as she inwardly termed it — 
with a fury that almost left her speechless. 

Oh, it was maddening, it was exasperating, it was disgusting, to 
have to waste all this wealth of histrionic tenderness upon a brain- 
less dolt like Johnny Watson ! Mrs. Mandeville seriously believed 
herself^ bo be one of the most ill-used women that ever walked the 
earth. 

It was entirely through force of circumstances, untoward circum- 
stances, that she found herself obliged to play a part so degrading, 
not to her woman’s heart, which perhaps did not exist, but to her 
powers of coquetry, on which she honestly piqued herself. 

“ I think you had better go,” she said, faintly. “You are deter- 
mined to torture me and she buried her face in the pillows. 

“ But look here, Nina — ” 

“ I shall never be able to look you in the face again.” 

“But Isay—” 

“Don’t say anything, Johnny. Leave the last word with me, and 
forget that I said it. Oh me ! when I think of that poor boy, my 
poor dear Stephen — ” 

“But I thought you didn’t care a rap for him!” cried Johnny 
Watson, fairly bewildered, as a wiser man than he might well have 
been, by these amazing utterances. 

“Don’t remind me that I was so heartless. He cared for me, 
poor boy ! and I think he was the only man that ever did. That is 
the one crime for which his sister can’t forgive me — that I was his 
ideal.” 

Johnny looked puzzled. The word ideal was not in his vocabu- 
lary. He was by no means clear as to its exact meaning, and regis- 
tered an inward vow to look it out in Webster s Dictionary on the 
earliest possible opportunity. Thinking it best, therefore, not to 
betray his ignorance, he essayed to turn the conversation. 

“ I suppose you’ve heard about her ?” 

“ I heard, of course, that she was going to sell herself to that 
dried-up mummy, Mr. Lewis. And she thinks she has a right to 
despise me. Well, when the accounts are made up 

“But haven’t you heard what has happened?” cried Johnny, en- 
chanted at finding himself at last on the solid ground of actual fact, 
after all this groping in the mire of fancy. Why, the newsboys 


348 


THE PRICE OF A PEARL 


were crying it about the streets. It’s in all the evening papers. 
And they say the poor fellow can’t live.” 

Mrs. Mandeville sat up immediately, literally as well as figura- 
tively. 

“You’re the most provoking man that ever lived !” she said, forci- 
bly. “Do, if you can, Johnny, try to be intelligent for once, and 
tell me exactly what has happened.” 

“ But I say, I thought you knew,” began Johnny. 

Mrs. Mandeville brought her very pretty feet to the ground, for 
the express purpose of stamping them on it. 

“Well, look here; you know — ” 

Another stamp brought Johnny to an astonished stand-still. 

“ What’s the matter ?” 

“ If you say that again, Johnny, I shall positively kill you ! You 
would madden a saint !” 

“But what am I doing? If you wouldn’t interrupt a fellow so 
frightfully — ” 

Mrs. Mandeville resumed her lounging posture on the sofa. 

“ Go on,” she said, resignedly. 

“ They were to have been married, you know, this afternoon.” 

Mrs. Mandeville nodded. 

“ Well, he never turned up. He was stopping at one of those big 
hotels, don’t you know, and he opened the lift -door instead of his 
own, and he dropped down from the third floor, and he is nearly in 
pieces, I believe. That’s about all I can tell you. Glendown was at 
the church, but he don’t seem inclined to talk about it.” 

“And Miss Merry weather, I suppose, is quite broken-hearted? 
She was so entirely devoted to Mr. Lewis.” 

Even Johnny, who was quite the least intelligent individual ever 
trusted with his own personal liberty, felt vaguely that these words, 
albeit “softer than butter” in the utterance, were not exactly com- 
passionate in spirit. 

“ It’s an awful sell for her, anyhow/’ he observed, half-apologeti- 
cally. 

“ It would have been an awful sell last month, if you like, before 
that old woman at Fingall left her all her money. Now, I suppose, 
it will be called a bereavement, or a visitation, or something of that 
sort. And Miss Merryweather will give herself the airs of a heroine.” 

Mrs. Mandeville’s acerbity grew at the rate of a snowball. Each 
word seemed to show more plainly that she absolutely hated Pearl. 

“But — she hasn’t ever stood in your light, has she?” asked Johnny, 


THE SAME DAY 


349 


in fresh bewilderment at this unexpected outburst of feminine spite- 
fulness. 

“ Oh, never !” But the woman’s mouth looked very tigerish as 
she closed it on these words. 

“ Old Lewis never was an admirer of yours, was he ?” 

A short laugh was the only answer vouchsafed to this tactless 
inquiry. 

“And I never was what you might call an admirer of hers,” pur- 
sued Jdhnny, under the impression, doubtless, that this news would 
be reassuring to Mrs. Mandeville. 

But to his amazement she only desired him very sharply not to 
talk nonsense. 

“ I say, Nina, why are you in such a wax all of a sudden ? What 
has put you out ?” 

Apparently his news had put her out, but the why and wherefore 
was hidden from him, and she took no notice of his puzzled queries. 

He watched her in gaping astonishment for some minutes. She 
was not acting now, and, as he of course was unaware that she had 
been acting before, he was proportionately mystified. 

Clearly she was in a state of suppressed excitement, and it had 
nothing to do with himself, or his relations with her. Her next 
words struck him as being rather heartless under the circumstances. 

“ Is he really likely to die, Johnny, or will they be able to patch 
him up for another day ?” 

“ He’s very bad,” said Johnny, with unusual brevity. “ I should 
think it was a toss-up if he ever gets about again.” 

“ What is the amount of damage done? Has he broken two of 
his legs, as the Irish would say, or concussed his brain, or what?” 

“ I say, Nina, don’t laugh at the poor chap ! I can’t quite make 
you out this evening, hanged if I can.” 

“Do I look like laughing?” 

AncLindeed there was not much mirth or pity either in the hard, 
glittering eyes which a few minutes before had set poor foolish 
Johnny’s pulses in a gallop. 

“He isn’t dead. That’s all I know. I suppose one will hear 
more to-morrow.” 

“ 4 Not dead, but speechless,’ ” quoted Mrs. Mandeville, with a 
shameful levity that almost scandalized her infatuated slave. She 
forgot that the worst man in the world (and Johnny, if bad, was by 
no means the worst) scarcely likes to find a woman more depraved 
and more unfeeling than himself. 


350 


THE PRICE OF A PEARL 


“ I say, you’re not glad, are you, that the poor beggar has come 
to grief ?” Johnny’s voice sounded reproachful as well as perplexed. 

“Are you very sorry,” she retorted, sharply, “ that you should 
pull such an absurdly long face about it? Is anybody very sorry? 
Do you think Miss Merry weather will break her heart if he dies? I 
can tell you she will be much more likely to break it if he lives and 
keeps her to her bargain. Now you may go, Johnny. I’ve had 
enough of you for one evening.” 

“ I know I wish I hadn’t let out about that nasty beastly acci- 
dent,” said Johnny, ruefully. “You’ve been quite different ever 
since.” 

Little indeed did he guess the significance to her of what had 
happened. Perhaps she had scarcely fully recognized it herself. 
But all sorts of possibilities were floating in her mind that evening, 
differing from each other in kind and degree so powerfully that it 
would have been hard to pitch upon the real key-note. 

She was glad, she was sorry, she was triumphant, she was dis- 
mayed, she was vindictive, she was apprehensive — and, before all 
things, she was malicious. Quite the sort of woman, in a wider 
sphere, to exercise a baneful influence on the destinies of nations ; 
whereas now her powers of mischief were limited to families. She 
might — given the opportunity and the conditions — have trafficked 
in political appointments, and signed away religious rights, and made 
bishops of her creatures, and persecuted honest men, and beguiled 
fools, like other famous or infamous women whom there is no need 
to specify. 

She was without compunction ; and to say this of a woman is to 
say that she is capable of any wickedness. 

After Johnny had left her she got up from the sofa, and pro- 
ceeded to unlock a handsome marqueterie escritoire, fitted up with 
innumerable drawers and pigeon-holes. 

Among these Mrs. Mandeville rummaged patiently for some min- 
utes, until at last her search proved successful, and she produced a 
photograph, carte-de-visite size, the inspection of which seemed to 
afford her a most malicious satisfaction. 

“I was afraid I had lost it,” she murmured, after having examined 
it to her heart’s content, with a venomous smile worthy of the wife 
of Potiphar. 

Why did she want it? It would have been hard to say, except 
that its existence was a tool in her hand for mischief. 

There was no ruth in her heart for the calamity of which she had 


THE SAME DAY 


351 


just heard, no feeling of awe at its appalling suddenness, no appre- 
hension of any possible judgment in her own worthless life, no 
shadow of regret for the irretrievable harm that she had wrought 
in the lives of others. A wreck of any sort spelled plunder to Mrs. 
Mandeville ; not necessarily material plunder, though she would not 
have drawn the line at that had it been available in the present in- 
stance, but plunder whereby another might be hopelessly impover- 
ished, wen if she herself were in no sense enriched. 

Pearl Merryweather was wealthy. Her future was assured, 
whether Mr. Lewis lived or died. But if she flattered herself that 
Hector Armytage was faithful to her memory, and kept her image 
enshrined in his heart, why then — it would be very easy to unde- 
ceive her. Of so foolish a belief as that she might well be plundered, 
and the offence was of a sort that the law does not recognize. 


CHAPTER VIII 


REPRIEVED 

“Ah, ’tis a truth that few confess, 

That lovers only understand, 

The heart must lift a wounded hand 
Life’s dearest treasures to possess.” 

“ No immediate danger.” 

That phrase was burned into poor Pearl Merry weather’s sick 
heart as if by a red-hot iron, and perhaps no one but Bertie ever 
fully guessed the torture it implied to her. 

For she could do nothing. That most galling of all burdens, en- 
forced inaction, was laid upon her. The tender ministrations with 
which she would fain have salved her troubled conscience were not 
required. 

There was no gleam of loving recognition in those fixed glassy 
eyes whereby she might take comfort, and hope for a forgiveness 
sealed in heaven of a sin unrecognized on earth. 

Silence in her soul, and darkness all around her. Such was the 
lot assigned now to the impatient spirit, whose worst errors might 
be traced to its revolt against delay. 

If she had only waited ! How often that vain wish had uttered 
itself in her heart during the dreary time of her engagement. She 
was compelled to wait now, with that fearful apparent irony of fate 
in which it is so hard to recognize a loving purpose. 

Perhaps she did, in part, recognize the Hand of God in what had 
happened, but it was as a feeble child spelling out laboriously, letter 
by letter, the words of the book of Life. What meaning have such 
words for him? What meaning had her misery for Pearl? None 
yet, except that it made all other things in life seem meaningless. 
Even her love for Hector seemed to have receded into some far dis- 
tant background, some by-gone period of her heart’s history, when 
her soul was still asleep. 

She could bear now to see Nurse Lois, meet her in daily inter- 


REPRIEVED 


353 


course, and know that to her had been committed the day-nursing 
which she would fain have taken on herself. 

Only a little while ago her whole being would have revolted 
against the arrangement which placed her rival in the post of chief 
responsibility. But not now. A great gulf had opened up between 
her past and present. The things that once seemed all-important 
and all-absorbing were strangely dwarfed. The voice of God had 
spoken in her heart, and that of man was silenced. 

She learned, too, in those days, if she had not known it before, in 
what high esteem the name was held which had so nearly been be- 
stowed on her. That the fashionable world should throng to leave 
cards and make kind inquiries did not greatly impress her. The 
terrible accident had been a nine days’ wonder, and society is always 
grateful for sensation — pleasurable or otherwise. 

It was the sincere solicitude of the poor that touched Pearl so 
deeply. She had never guessed that one so unbending to his equals 
would have succeeded in gaining the genuine affection of those whom 
the world counts as almost social outcasts. 

These came at strange out-of-the-way hours, to learn tidings of 
their benefactor, and sometimes they would ask to be allowed to see 
“ the la(i)dy.” 

Rough men came whom he had waited for, so they told Pearl, 
outside the prison gates, when they had completed their term of 
punishment, that he might give to each of them what God knows 
we all need sometimes — the chance of a fresh start. And awkward 
lads came too, whom he had found time to try to civilize in night- 
schools, not always unsuccessfully, since their clumsy sympathy testi- 
fied to their appreciation of his efforts. 

And all the while he lay unconscious in one of the private 
wards of St. Basil’s Hospital, while skilled surgeons and learned 
physicians met in earnest consultation on the mischief none could 
remedy. 

They could amputate the crushed foot, set the broken bones, and 
bandage the torn sinews, but there were internal injuries which it 
was impossible to gauge at present. And what the final upshot 
might be, whether the long coma would end in collapse, or whether 
the paralyzed brain would revive to agonized consciousness, none 
could dare to say. But each day for weeks the report was the same: 
“No immediate danger.” 

And meanwhile the London season was in full swing. There was 
the usual record of smart marriages, of grand dinners, and crowded 
23 


354 


THE PRICE OF A PEARL 


receptions and magnificent balls among the denizens of that world 
which so exaggerates its own importance as to believe in all sincerity 
that, when at the end of July it advises itself to go out of town, town 
is therefore empty. 

In the marriage-market of this modern Babylon there were, of 
course, sundry big prizes eagerly competed for by scores — nay, hun- 
dreds — of excited damsels, whose bloom was strangely damaged iu 
the process. And of these prizes the courtesy-title of Marquis of 
Glendown was, as may be readily supposed, one of the most coveted. 

To his own unmixed dismay, poor Bertie found himself the 
champion eligible of the day, the target of countless manoeuvres 
and stale devices and stereotyped strategies, which only last year, in 
his capacity of detrimental, had offered him unmixed amusement, 
but now depressed him beyond words. He began indeed to under- 
stand fully how it was that his elder brother, thus pursued, had gone 
down to an early grave. 

The duchess had not apparently yet succeeded in finding the right 
mate for himself. In spite of his repeated asseveration that any one 
would “do,” he managed, when it came to the point, to pick so 
many holes in those specimens submitted, as it were, “ on approba- 
tion,” for his choice, that his mother was almost in despair, the more 
so because she had heard — of course, on the best authority — that he 
was forever going to visit some one whom he could not, if he would, 
have married. 

“Don’t you think people will talk,” she asked him, anxiously, one 
day, “ if you go and see Miss Merry weather so very often ?” 

“ They may,” responded her eccentric son, cheerfully if briefly. 

“ But, my dear Glendown, you should consider her in the matter.” 

“ It is because I do consider her that I go occasionally — not very 
often, as you suggested just now, but occasionally — to visit her and 
her dear old aunt, who are about the two loneliest women in London 
at the present moment.” 

“ Indeed !” said the duchess, with a certain stateliness which he 
had learned to associate with even a distant allusion to Miss Merry- 
weather. “ I should have thought they would have a great many 
friends, especially as you tell me she has come into a large fortune 
by the death of some relative.” 

“By Jove!” exclaimed Bertie, “that’s pretty rough on human 
nature, mother! I used to think I was what you might call a self- 
sprung cynic, but I now perceive that my very poor opinion of my 
kind is hereditary.” 


REPRIEVED 


355 


The duchess hastened to give a less offensive interpretation to her 
recent utterance. She was aware, she explained, that Miss Merry- 
weather was now in her proper position, which of course she had not 
been when Glendown had first introduced her. 

“ And Naturally,” continued her Grace, a little more graciously, 
“she will have had a great deal of sympathy in her recent trial.” 

Bertie assented to this proposition, albeit with an inward scepti- 
cism as to the value of the sympathy offered which might somewhat 
have perplexed his mother. 

“Of course, if she had not been engaged,” added the duchess, 
thoughtfully. 

“ She would have done for me, I suppose ?” supplemented her son, 
in his most mocking accents. 

The duchess was not prepared to admit as much as this. 

“ She is not in the least the sort of wife we should have chosen for 
you, my dear boy; but if you had insisted — ” 

“ You wouldn’t have said me nay, I fancy?” in a tone of lazy good- 
humor that masked his real bitterness. 

“ Not if you had insisted,” conceded the duchess, but there was 
a little visible effort in her manner that betrayed her secret prej- 
udice. 

Bertie’s smile was slightly self-scornful. 

“Unfortunately, my dear mother, she said nay the only time I 
ever asked her.” 

Silence for some moments after this shell had exploded. A real 
bomb could scarcely have disturbed her Grace’s composure more ef- 
fectually. She was almost speechless with indignation. 

“Am I to understand — ” she began, very loftily; but he stopped 
her with one of his most characteristic gestures. 

“Now, my mother, don’t let us call any one by bad names. You 
are to understand that she is the only woman I have ever cared for, 
that she is the only woman I ever shall care for, and that so long as 
she remains unmarried I can’t ask any one else to be my wife.” 

“You should have told me this before,” said his mother, with 
mingled tenderness and anger vibrating in her voice and gleaming 
in her eyes. 

“ There was no necessity to tell you before. When I came home 
from abroad I thought she was married. I would have tossed up 
for any girl you cared to propose to me then. One would have 
done as well as another. You may remember that I told you so.” 

“ But you never gave me an idea of this. If you had — ” 


356 


THE PRICE OF A PEARL 


“If I had, it would have made no odds. Of course you hate her, 
mother, because she doesn’t want to marry me. You would have 
hated her worse if you had thought she did want the situation that 
is now going a-begging. It is manifestly impossible to please any 
woman — old or young.” 

When Glendown took the trouble to adopt this tone, it was gener- 
ally felt by those who were acquainted with his peculiar idiosyncra- 
sies that he was in deadly earnest. The duchess, therefore, aban- 
doned her lofty position on the spot, and declared with becoming 
meekness that Glendown’s happiness was the thing of all others most 
earnestly desired both by his father and herself. 

“ Then, for God’s sake,” urged Bertie, “ don’t ask me to go through 
this farce of marriage just yet.” 

“But if only — ” 

“ If only I would listen to reason ! Yes, I know, mother, but 
unfortunately I am not reasonable; I never was, and you must legis- 
late for me accordingly. I haven’t the smallest hope of making 
Miss Merryweather my wife. If poor Bat Lewis gave up the ghost 
to-morrow, there’s still some one else to be reckoned with. And, if 
he was out of the way, I don’t know that she would have me. But 
as long as she remains unmarried I can’t perjure myself before the 
altar with another woman.” 

“ Can you expect me to think well of her,” said her Grace, re- 
proachfully, “ if she is such a woman as you describe ?” 

“ As far as I am aware, I haven’t described her. And if she was 
an angel from heaven you would still hate her until you had learned 
to love her. The Almighty has made mothers so.” 

To this charge the duchess returned the most sensible answer 
possible, by taking her boy’s head upon her motherly bosom, and 
fondling him as if he had been still a little wailing unweaned infant. 

“ The Almighty has made sons 50,” she whispered, lovingly, and 
was rewarded by one of Bertie’s rare caresses. 

One bitter word at that moment might have alienated him irre- 
trievably, but the duchess, although an aristocrat to her finger-tips 
— by which is here signified that her sympathy confined itself to 
her own order of humanity — was also a very womanly woman, and 
knew that certain reckless utterances from vexed masculine lips 
were best left unanswered. Her forbearance was not lost on Bertie; 
who guessed that she would, if necessary, obtain a reprieve for him 
from his father, pressing as the question naturally was of an im- 
pending match for the future Duke of Tenterbury. 


REPRIEVED 


357 


“ Give me time, mother,” he pleaded, and for once the jester was 
in complete abeyance. “Let me alone for this one year. Next 
year you can do as you please, put a halter round my neck, and 
trot me up and down Piccadilly, if you think that will advance 
matters.” 

“There are so many nice women in the world,” responded the 
duchess, with a resigned sigh. 

She could not understand, perhaps no mother really can, why one 
woman should not do as well as another. 

“I’m willing to believe it, but there’s only one I want, and I don’t 
know that she’s exactly what you’d call nice either I” 

The duchess abstained with most admirable tact from offering 
any opinion on this point, although in her own mind she was per- 
fectly certain that Miss Merry weather was “ anything but nice.” 

For answer she pointed to a picture on the wall, representing 
herself at a by-gone period of her existence as a young and hand- 
some woman surrounded by bonny boys of various ages and sizes. 

“Think what it means, Glendown, to your father and me, that 
not one of those should be left alive to us but yourself.” 

“ I would that any one of them might have been left except my- 
self,” said Bertie, heavily. “ It’s a terrible responsibility to be the 
last of your race.” 

“ But you won’t shirk it, my boy ?” 

There were tears in his mother’s eyes as she laid her hand im- 
ploringly on his arm. It was anguish to her that a strange woman 
should have it in her power to make or mar the destinies of an an- 
cient house like that of Tenterbury, but she was wise enough to 
dissemble her own personal bitterness. 

“ I won’t shirk it, mother ; once her fate is settled, I take no fur- 
ther interest in my own. As our French neighbors would put it, I 
withdraw my pin from the game. But for this one year be like the 
man in the parable, and let me alone.” 

“ A telegram for Lord Glendown.” 

Bertie took the yellow envelope and opened it mechanically. 

“Perhaps I mayn’t have to keep you so long,” he said, with a 
touch of his old drollery when he had read it. “ The other fellow 
will be back this month, in all probability.” 

“ The other fellow !” repeated the duchess, with an air of stately 
perplexity. 

“ The one she likes, mother ; she never liked me.” 

“ My dear,” said his mother, very gently, but withal very incisive- 


358 


THE PRICE OF A PEARL 


ly, “ the only night I ever saw you together I made up my mind 
that she loved you.” 

And when she left the room Bertie felt strangely comforted, 
notwithstanding the fact that the other fellow would be coming 
back soon, and that he himself was only reprieved, not pardoned, 
still less discharged. 


CHAPTER IX 


ANOTHER SHADOW 

“ Here was a man to whom love was something better than his own desires 
leering on a pedestal.” 

Whether she loved him or not, there could be no doubt of the 
warmth of her welcome when he dropped in late that same after- 
noon, to pay one of those occasional visits for which he had just 
been called in question. She was sitting at a writing-table with her 
back to the door, but facing her there was a gilt-framed mirror, 
which betrayed her quick, pleased smile at sight of her visitor, who, 
for his part, was so far dazzled that for a moment he was scarcely 
conscious of the words she spoke in greeting. 

“ The hospital ?” he repeated, vaguely, that being the last word 
which had penetrated to his preoccupied brain. 

“ Yes, have you been there, Lord Glendown ? Have you seen 
Nurse Lois?” 

“Can she have heard already?” thought Glendown, much per- 
plexed at this query. “If so, what does the fellow mean by wiring 
to me?” 

But as these interrogations could not in the nature of things be 
uttered aloud, he was obliged hastily to frame some other reply. 

“ I haven’t — been there yet. What does she know about it?” 

It was Pearl’s turn now to look astonished, and also disap- 
pointed, for she had counted on his ready sympathy. 

“ Even the doctors don’t know as much as she does. You forget 
she is always there.” 

“ I beg your pardon. Of course, I wasn’t thinking — or, at least, 
I was thinking of something else. You have better news, then — of 
Mr. Lewis?” 

“ They think,” said Pearl, in a low, hurried murmur that never 
failed to bring a sensation as of a wooden saw across the region of 
his throat, “ that he is getting back his consciousness. His eyes 
followed her about the room to-day. She says the glassy stare has 
left them.” 


360 


THE PRICE OF A PEARL 


“Has he said nothing?” 

Pearl shook her head. 

“Yon won’t insist on seeing him till — ” 

“ I must not, I know. It might be bad for him.” 

Very touching was the humility of her tone as she said this. He 
turned aside for a moment, lest his glistening eyes and twitching 
lips should betray him. 

“ I am thankful for what you tell me, Miss Merry weather. It is 
a step in the right direction.” 

“ I wanted you to know. I was going to write to you if you 
had not come in this evening.” 

“ I came — I don’t quite know why I came — I had something to 
tell you. Shall we be disturbed if I stay a little longer?” 

“ I can say not at home ; in fact, I did say not at home, except 
to you. I didn’t want to see any one else.” 

He was not sure whether her words made him most happy or 
most miserable. They meant so much, but alas ! also so little. 
Was it fated that she was forever, consciously or unconsciously, to 
beckon him on like a Lorelei to his own destruction, or might he 
really suffer himself to believe that she was learning to lean on him, 
to look to him for help and sympathy and counsel, until at last his 
love would seem a matter of course? 

Hector’s telegram burned uneasily in his pocket, by way of an- 
swer to these wild conjectures. 

“ I heard to - day from a friend of mine. I think perhaps you 
know the man I mean?” 

He looked at her as he spoke, and saw to his surprise that the 
same cold, hard expression of implacable resentment had clouded her 
face which he remembered to have seen once before on that never- 
to-be-forgotten disastrous eve of a yet more disastrous day. 

“ Miss Merry weather, how has he displeased you ? Why are your 
thoughts concerning him so unspeakably bitter, as I can’t help seeing 
that they are ?” 

“ I haven’t the smallest right to feel — bitter. Please don’t fancy 
that I think I have.” 

“ As to the right,” he answered, rather bluntly, “ I know nothing. 
But as to the fact I can swear, and as his friend and confidant it 
seems to me I have the right to ask you why.” 

“ I would rather not tell you. He is your friend, and that’s 
enough for me.” 

“ Nay, pardon me, that won’t do. He is my friend, and for that 


ANOTHER SHADOW 


361 


reason I must see him righted if he has been wronged. If you 
doubt his loyalty to what he once felt for you, you can read this, 
which I received this morning. It has the merit of being straight- 
forward.” 

He laid before her an unfolded sheet of thin pink paper, con- 
taining these few words : 

“ Can I help her? Have chance of exchange to homeward-hound 
steamer. — H. Armytage .” 

All his life long the man had been modest — modest with that 
rare modesty which fears to pry into the secret motives or to spy 
upon the sacred emotions of any human soul. He knew many 
things by intuition, but where scrutiny would have been sacrilege, 
he shunned it as pestilential to his own soul. 

And so now, as more than once before in his relations with her, 
he looked away where others would have gazed relentlessly, and re- 
fused to see the eloquent blood rush into her face and the telltale 
moisture suffuse her eyes. How many times his heart beat before 
her voice at last broke the silence he did not know, but it seemed 
to him she must have heard its furious pulsations. 

“ Lord Glendown, I cannot understand your friend.” 

He turned round quickly, and once more faced her. 

“ That, at least,” he said, pointedly, “ may be allowed to speak 
for itself.” 

“ Why — does he want to help me ?” 

“ Because, I take it, he is loyal to the past.” 

“ Is he loyal to the past?” 

“ Will you tell me why you doubt it? I am aware that you have 
heard some apocryphal story of an engagement which I can take 
upon myself to deny.” 

“ If he were engaged, I should not have the least right to be 
angry. I don’t think I ever was angry — with him.” 

“ You are angry now,” said Bertie, with a little extra brevity of 
manner by way of self-defence. 

“ I think that Nurse Lois might be angry — if she knew.” 

“If she knew — what? What is there for her to know? And 
why do you insist upon her having any right to know any- 
thing ?” 

“ I have been told she is engaged to him.” 

“ She is not engaged to him. I have the best possible grounds 
for making that statement. He had intended, I know, to have asked 
her to be his wife whenever he might be in a position to support 


362 


THE PRICE OF A PEARL 


one; but, as a matter of fact, he left England without carrying out 
his intention. I know that, and I know why.” 

Pearl was silent. 

Without raising his voice in the faintest degree, Bertie had the 
art of conveying to his bearers on certain occasions the conviction 
that they must “ stand from under.” There was a latent force in 
him which he seldom took the trouble to exert, but when he did he 
was apt to startle those who had learned to presume on his harmless 
eccentricities. 

Strange to say, Pearl had first come in contact with it the day, 
more than six years before, that she rejected his love, and in so 
doing was compelled for the first time in her whole life to acknowl- 
edge a mental as well as a moral superior. She had never been 
able to take the least pride in his feeling for her, so completely was 
it swamped in that with which he had managed to inspire her for 
herself. And so from that day to the present she had held in the 
highest reverence the man who had first struck her as scarcely better 
than a fool. 

Seeing that he had reduced her to silence, Bertie proceeded to 
vouchsafe some further explanation. 

“ The night before Armytage left England, I met you at that 
concert — you may remember — where I introduced you to my 
mother. I went on to see him, and I expected to hear that he and 
Nurse Lois had arrived at some understanding. I knew he had a 
warm friendship for her. They had seen a good deal of each other 
at St. Basil’s, worked together, learned together, helped one another, 
done all the things that endear two people to each other in either 
sex. But he was not in love with her. I knew that, though I 
thought it likely before he left England that he would ask her to 
marry him. But he saw your face the same night that I saw it, 
when you were on your way to the house where I met you. It is 
idle to say I wish he hadn’t seen it, but he did, and he left England 
without saying anything to Nurse Lois. If he has written to her 
since — you say he has — it was as a friend, not as a lover. That is all 
I can tell you, Miss Merry weather. Perhaps there is something that 
you can tell me ?” 

She felt a tacit challenge in the question, eloquent of proud con- 
fidence in the man whom he called friend. That it was misplaced 
she did not doubt, but none the less she loved him for it. 

“ I can tell you nothing,” she began, doubtfully, 'but was cut short 
at the outset. 


ANOTHER SHADOW 


363 


“ It is the curse of your sex — forgive me for saying so — that you 
believe without waiting for proof. You bring forward vague accu- 
sations against your best friend, and you have nothing to show for 
it, after all.” 

“ I have something to show, Lord Glendown.” There was a 
moment’s breathless pause after these words fell from her lips. 

Each looked at the other, not defiantly or distrustfully, but search- 
ingly, with honest, unswerving eyes. There was no coquetry in hers, 
no selfish passion in his. The man and the woman met in that 
moment on equal terms. 

“ Then please show it to me,” he asked, simply. 

“ I did not mean to show it to any one ; in fact, I didn’t mean 
to keep it. I don’t know who sent it to me, or why. There must 
be some one in the world who hates him, and doesn’t love me, or I 
suppose this wouldn’t have been sent to me.” 

He watched her with a sort of dazed expression as she took from 
her writing-case an ordinary envelope directed to herself, and placed 
it on the table at her elbow. 

“ Will you open it, please, or rather take out the enclosure? Re- 
member, you wished to see it, Lord Glendown. I don’t wish to 
show it.” 

He obeyed her, took out from the envelope a photograph, looked 
at it in growing astonishment, and then dropped it as if it had been 
a red-hot cinder. 

“Great Scott!” he muttered, under his breath, “are we both 
dreaming ?” 

The photograph represented his friend in the act of clasping by 
both hands a singularly handsome girl. The attitude of both figures 
was essentially lover-like. Each was gazing as if spell-bound in silent 
ecstasy at the other, in an apparently unstudied pose suggestive of 
the closest familiarity — a pose, in short, wherein engaged lovers 
might possibly be discovered, but would not willingly be seen, far 
less be placed by the photographer. And yet undoubtedly the man 
was Hector Armytage, once known as Hector MacAdam, who in 
some by-gone era of her life, which now seemed like a dream, had 
kissed Pearl’s lips, and held her in his arms and told her that he 
loved her. 

A deep flush slowly overspread the face of Hector’s friend, a flush 
of mingled shame and bewilderment. 

“ This — this must be a practical joke,” he stammered, uneasily. 

“A joke!” 


364 


THE PRICE OF A PEARL 


She said no more, but no more was needed to show that by her 
at least the joke was counted a very grim one. 

“ Who could have sent it?” 

“ It came, as you see, in that envelope. I don’t know the hand- 
writing. I thought no one ever knew — what — you knew.” 

“ From me, no one knows anything about you. I think I need 
hardly tell you that.” 

She bowed her head in dignified silence. Again he took up the 
telltale carte and looked for some name or mark on the back which 
might serve as an index to its origin. But there was nothing to 
guide him. The card on which the photo had been pasted was blank. 
The handwriting on the envelope was unfamiliar if also undistin- 
guished. The postmark was simply “ London E.C.” 

“ If this had been a joke of one of the Basil students,” said Ber- 
tie, thoughtfully, “it would not have been sent to you.” 

“How can it be a joke?” she answered, with a touch of sore im- 
patience in her tone. 

“ One has heard of such a thing as a demon camera,” he contin- 
ued, as much to himself as to her. 

“ Can a demon camera photograph a thing that has no existence ?” 
she asked him, pointedly. 

He could not answer in the negative. The shadow cast by the 
sun must have had some substance behind it. It was a fact that 
could not be explained away, however it might be accounted for, 
and Bertie was compelled to own himself nonplussed. 

“ When did you get it?” he asked, presently, conscious of a wild 
desire to obliterate both time and space, and demand an instant ex- 
planation from his friend. 

“ About three days, I think, after — ” 

“ After the accident.” 

“Yes; I was alone when it came.” 

“ You didn’t say anything about it to Nurse Lois?” 

Pearl looked astonished at the suggestion. 

“Why should I? She does not know that I have ever seen 
him.” 

“ I beg your pardon. I did not realize that. Then no one knows 
of this?” 

“ No one. I had never meant to tell you.” 

“I am exceedingly glad you did tell me. I shall not rest till I 
have run this matter to earth, and cleared up the mystery.” 

“ But — Lord Glendown — what right have I to resent it, if it is 


ANOTHER SHADOW 


365 


what it seems to be? You said I was bitter, but you know very 
well that he had the best light to be bitter once.” 

“ If he had the right, he didn’t take it,” Bertie answered, in a low 
voice. 

“And I have none,” she continued, hurriedly, as if remorseful for 
her recent action. “ It ought not to make the slightest difference 
to me.” 

“ You have a right,” replied Bertie, with pardonable heat of man- 
ner. “ If one has ever cared for any human being, one has a right 
to expect well of that person, and to be disappointed if he or she 
turns out otherwise. He would say you had the right, even if you 
never met again.” 

Once more it had been given him to say the right thing to her, 
and she breathed freely when he had thus sanctioned her sense of 
intolerable and sickening disappointment. Again she had confessed 
and been absolved, and her hidden wound had found healing. 

It was not until after he had left her, taking with him the myste- 
rious “shadow,” that she remembered the telegram he had shown 
her, and realized with a start that the main point at issue had been 
left undiscussed and undecided. 

But Bertie had acted on his own responsibility, and that same 
evening a message was flashed to Bombay bearing these significant 
words : 

“ Come home in any case. — Glendown .” 


CHAPTER X 


GIVEN BACK 

“I love thee so well 
That I only can leave thee.” 

“ Are you prepared, Pearl, to see him altered ?” 

Mrs. Fursden’s soft brown eyes looked more than usually full of 
ruth as she watched the niece so dear to her preparing for what 
could not but be a strange and painful interview'. That afternoon 
she was to see Mr. Lewis for the first time ; and though she had to 
a certain extent made up her mind beforehand that he must be 
greatly altered, her aunt could not help feeling that a severe shock 
awaited her. 

“Nurse Lois says he has made wonderful progress in the last 
week,” Pearl said, with the resolute cheerfulness of one who refuses 
to be alarmed or discouraged. 

“ Lord Glendown was dreadfully shocked after he had seen him,” 
replied Mrs. Fursden, very gravely. 

She could not, indeed, forget Bertie’s awed face (she had been the 
first to see it) when he came away from that brief interview with the 
man who was to have been Pearl’s husband. 

It was almost as if he had been in the presence of the dead ; yet 
no one hinted now at the possibility of the man’s dying, and each 
day saw some distinct advance towards recovery. 

Lewis had himself sent for Lord Glendown, why, no one knew, 
and his visitor did not reveal what had passed between them. But 
that he had been deeply moved he could not conceal, and it was with 
evident anxiety that he heard of the doctor’s decision that Pearl 
might at last be admitted. 

Of herself he had seen little or nothing during the past score of 
days. Some instinct of unreasoning loyalty to Hector, of bashful 
chivalry to her, had kept him away. But at certain intervals Pearl 
was made aware of his existence by the receipt of a newspaper marked 
with blue ink, which informed her of the whereabouts of the home- 


GIVEN BACK 


367 


coming P. and 0. steamer from Bombay. She was half-angry and 
half-grateful when these silent intimations came of that which she 
longed to know, yet could not bring herself to speak about. 

Perhaps no woman ever found herself in quite so strange a posi- 
tion, or fettered by so many secret fears and wordless misgivings of 
a sort she could not frame, far less betray, even to her own heart. 
For there are times in the lives of most of us when self-questioning 
is almost impious, and self-analysis is as the sin of Noah’s accursed 
son. 

But let her hidden smarts be what they might, let her inclination 
and her duty struggle as they listed, one man in the world at that 
time understood her, though he never seemed to care to call himself 
her friend. 

None the less, she counted him as such ; and he would have been 
amazed to know how much she missed him when he stayed away — 
how long the days were in which she did not see his quaint visage, 
with its odd, mismatched windows to a soul of crystal purity. 

And now the last dumb message had been delivered to her, the 
last stage of the journey was begun. The ship had left Gibraltar, 
and she knew, although he had not told her so, that he would go and 
meet it at Southampton. Beyond that she would not trust herself 
to go, even in fancy. Her will, less unstable than of old, was set to 
do what she believed to be her duty, and she prayed each day for 
grace to do it tenderly. 

If only she could feel sure that Hector was what she had believed 
him to be, it seemed to her that she could endure to be parted from 
him — yes, and even to know that he would marry another woman. 

It was a very softened, very chastened Pearl who was ushered late 
that afternoon into the presence of the man whom she was still — in 
thought and intention, at least — engaged to marry. Nurse Lois came 
out as she went in. The two women paused an instant on the thresh- 
old to exchange greetings. In the heart of each was a feeling of pro- 
found pity for the other. One of the two knew that she was thus 
compassionated, and her newly-born humility struggled with her na- 
tive pride against the natural resentment to which this knowledge 
gave birth. The other was in blissful ignorance of any reason why 
she should be pitied ; her mind, like a wholesome stream, was clear 
because full. Her present was bright with congenial work, her future 
bright with lawful hope. And yet how vain was her hope, and how 
dreary would be her work without the bright vision which was only 
a mirage ! Then the door was closed softly, and Pearl went forward 


368 


THE PRICE OF A PEARL 


by herself into the half-darkened room. Only a few steps, however, 
for the next moment a chill horror rooted her to the ground. 

It was another man — an old, almost a decrepit man — who lay there 
before her, strapped down to his slanting-board. It was surely not 
Bartholomew Lewis ! The beard of seven weeks’ growth upon his 
face was almost white, and veiled the rigid outline of the stern mouth 
so entirely that the whole character of the man’s countenance was 
metamorphosed. The eyes, which she had never seen before with- 
out their glasses, looked pathetically feeble and wistful ; the temples 
were hollowed out by the relentless chisel of bodily no less than men- 
tal anguish ; the cheeks were sunken, and the waxy skin was drawn 
tightly over the bones with that peculiar look so painfully suggestive 
of a skull which is the surest indication in the world of broken health 
and shattered nerves. Little by little all these things were made clear 
to her as she stood a few paces from him, her eyes distended with a 
terror which dried her tongue and sealed her lips. 

It was his voice, after all — a very weak and quavering voice — that 
first broke the deathly silence. 

“ I can’t stir, my dearest. I can’t even hold out my hand to 
you.” 

She found speech then, and the next moment was leaning over 
him in an agony of remorseful misery. 

“ Oh !” she cried, despairingly, though she had been warned to be 
careful, “ they said you were so much better.” 

“ I am better, Pearl, but I shall never be well. I sent for you to 
tell you so.” 

He looked exactly like a corpse that moment — a corpse laid out 
for burial in an open coffin. The awful stillness of his form seemed 
like that of death. Only the slow motion of his blanched lips and 
the weak sounds that issued from them showed that he was still in 
the body, prisoned in his own maimed tabernacle, chained down by 
that most mighty of all tyrants, the giant strength of weakness. 

She felt a wild longing to throw herself face foremost on the floor, 
and grovel in the dust before him. All these weeks past she had 
been trying to picture his condition, and each day the effort had be- 
come more mechanical, the mental vision more indistinct, simply 
because that which can be seen and handled tends always to oblit- 
erate fancy ; and faith in the unseen, whether on earth or in heaven, 
is the hardest of all faculties to be maintained at any really work- 
ing power. 

And all these weeks, while she had gone in and out, and drawn 


GIVEN BACK 


369 


breath freely, and looked at the sunlight, and eaten and drunk, and 
slept peacefully, he had been lying thus, not bearing his cross — in 
the language of devotion — but stretched upon it. 

Why had God not struck him dead at once ? Why had He con- 
demned them both to this slow torture of lingering pain and help- 
lessness? She knew why, before she left his side that afternoon. 
His own lips told her. 

“ Thank God,” he said, slowly and earnestly, “ that this happened 
before, Pearl, and not afterwards.” 

“ Oh, why do you say that ?” 

Remorse, such as the doomed may feel in hell, prompted, her to 
make this answer, and the tears gushed freely from her eyes. 

“ If I had been your wife — ” 

“ You will never be my wife.” 

She drew her chair a little nearer, and laid her hand on one of 
his. 

“ I have counted myself your wife — I have, indeed, dear. They 
can all tell you that.” 

“ They have told me, and I bless you for it. But you will never 
call me husband.” 

“You will get better, I know you will get better. For my sake 
you will get better,” she urged him, tearfully. 

“ Child,” he answered, sadly, “ if there were nothing but my 
health between us, you would not be here to-day. I would have 
waited, as I have waited. But it is not a question of waiting now.” 

“ It is the only thing I — we — can do now — unless — ” 

“Unless,” he repeated, earnestly — “ unless what, Pearl?” 

"Sinless you would — rather not — wait any longer — and then I 
should have the right — I mean no o,ne could forbid me then — to 
nurse you myself, and help you to get well.” 

He was silent for a long time after she had murmured these 
broken words. His eyes were fast closed, but she saw two big tears 
well out from beneath the heavy lids and trickle slowly down his 
face. His lips moved silently. Perhaps he was praying for strength 
to put away from him forever the tempting cup her hand held out. 
It was in good faith, he knew, that she had offered it. 

She would tend him right carefully, minister to him very tenderly, 
bear patiently the tedium of his convalescence, but she would not 
give him that which alone could sweeten the sacrifice to either of 
them. Nay, it was not hers to give, and the time was past when he 
could have wrested it from her, 

24 


370 


THE PRICE OF A PEARL 


“ You do not know,” he said, at last, almost with the coldness of 
white-heat, “ what you are saying.” 

“Yes, I do know. It has been done before now, and we surely 
need not mind what people say. And — and — I long so to be able 
to comfort you.” 

“ You can’t, dearest. You can’t even call me by my name. Do 
you know that I have never once heard it from your lips? I have 
wondered sometimes as I lay here whether you prayed for me as Mr. 
Lewis ?” 

No answer; but she grew white under these tenderly incisive 
words, and the hand she had laid on his shook visibly. He looked 
down at it with an unspeakable wistfnlness. His own ring was on 
the third finger, a hoop of flawless pearls, every one picked by an 
expert in his presence as the best and purest of its kind. 

“ You wear it still, I see !” 

“Would you have had me take it off?” she answered, humbly. 

“ I ought never to have put it on, Pearl. My dear old uncle was 
right, after all. You gave me the hand, but — did the heart go with 
it ?” 

“You said — you said — that — you would be satisfied. I did not 
lie to you.” 

“ No. You did not lie to me, you poor child. But I lied to my- 
self. I said to myself that I would force you to love me. But I, of 
all men, ought to know that love cannot be forced.” 

“ I thought,” faltered Pearl, “ that you were happy. Honestly, I 
thought so.” 

“ Were you happy ?” he asked her, searchingly. “ Do you think 
I thought you were, for one single moment, after my uncle’s death ? 
God forgive me for not setting you free there and then. I ought to 
have done it.” 

Again she was silent. What could she say in the face of such 
terrible self-searching as this? A false word would have blistered 
her lips, and the truth would have given him needless torture. In 
the light of his own conscience he could read her heart now as if 
it had been an open book, and knew whose name was written 
there. 

“ No, you didn’t deceive me, Pearl, but — you said that there was 
no one between us?” 

“That was true — in a sense. At least — I thought no one else 
cared for me.” 

“ Child, child ! there is one who has always been between iis. 


GIVEN BACK 


371 


Always I have seen his face beside yours, when I wanted to see 
yours alone. I saw it that first night at your aunt’s house, I saw it 
when I had climbed to the top of the Druid’s Stone. My God ! 
did I ever climb, could I ever use my limbs like other people, or is 
that a dream like the rest ?” 

“Don’t, don’t!” she besought him, piteously. “If you knew how 
it tortures me to hear you talk like that J” 

“ Pearl,” he said, after a moment or two, and this time his voice 
had sunk to an exhausted whisper, “ I saw it once again — the face, 
I mean. It was when I opened that door, and fell down into the 
black darkness.” 

He shuddered, they both shuddered ; and again she implored him 
to be silent, but he shook his head. 

“ I don’t know how long I took to fall, but to me it was an 
eternity, for I saw my whole life in it.” 

“ A good life,” she murmured, soothingly. “ There are few who 
could show such a record.” 

His answer was a groan. 

“ Good !” he repeated, with a smile that matched the groan. 

“ If you knew all that I have heard of what you have done, and 
how you are loved — ” she began, impulsively. 

He stopped her with an imploring look, and for some moments 
lay still and said nothing. 

“ Do you know who he is, Pearl ?” 

It seemed a long, time to her, though it was but a few minutes 
before he asked her this strange question. In them her thoughts 
had travelled far, even beyond the seas. She recalled them with a 
telltale start, and her eyes looked strangely soft and tender as she 
answered, with confusion : 

“You mean — ” 

“ I mean the man you care for.” 

“ I have never said I cared for him.” 

“Not even to himself?” 

“ I — don’t think — I mean, I — Perhaps — there was no need to 
say it once.” 

“ Does he not know it now, Pearl ?” 

“How can he know it now ? Oh, I treated him so badly ! I was 
such a miserable coward.” 

She hid her face in her hands, and for some moments sobbed 
bitterly. 

“ Tell me everything, Pearl. I have a right to know.” 


372 


THE PRICE OF A PEARL 


She looked in his face, and saw — not the old hunger, but a sad, 
patient gentleness which set him on a higher plane than he had ever 
occupied as her lover. 

Was it really to Bartholomew Lewis that she found herself the 
next moment unfolding her brief yet pregnant love-story? She 
had lived for years with Mrs. Fursden and told her nothing. Even 
Bertie knew only what he could discover for himself. This man 
was the last to whom she would have ever dreamed of saying any- 
thing. And behold ! it was to him that in the fulness of time she 
unburdened herself, telling him all without reserve: her love, her 
feebleness, her futile sorrow, her renewed hope, her sickening dis- 
appointment, her faithless despair of the future, her final acceptance 
of himself. 

“ I wish you had told me before, Pearl.” 

The words recalled her to a sense of what she had admitted, and 
the hot blood tided up into her face. 

“ How could I have ever told you ?” 

“No, you could not. I was not — well, not the sort of man ex- 
actly to invite your confidence. But, thank God, you have given it 
to me now. It makes it easier for me to say what I wanted to say, 
dearest, before we part.” 

“Do you despise me?” she asked, faintly, more and more abased 
in her own eyes as she became more conscious of the full signifi- 
cance to this man of all that she had told him. 

“ I love you,” was the brief answer. 

“ stiii r 

One word may hold a world of meaning, and one such word he 
spoke to her. 

“Always.” 

“But I have been so weak and unstable, more than you know 
even now, for I could never tell you all.” 

“ You have told me enough, and I don’t despise you. Now I 
have something to tell you. Your friend Lord Glendown knows it, 
but he thought I had better tell you myself. He did not think 
you knew that — his friend’s mother had been my wife’s sister. 
And the name he now goes by was her maiden name.” 

“ But — I don’t understand— Do you mean — did you know that, 
long ago, at Fingall ?” 

“ I knew it when I climbed the Druid’s Stone. I had found out 
by that time who he was, and I knew that he could never inherit 
Adamscourt.” 


GIVEN BACK 


373 


“ And you never told me !” she exclaimed, almost reproachfully ; 
but the next moment she had checked herself. 

Why should he have told her anything when she had assured 
him that no one stood between herself and him, that in taking her 
hand he was robbing no man? 

“ I did not tell you at the time, because you had just refused me 
for his sake. You can understand that my lips were sealed for 
that very reason. I of all men could not be the one to destroy your 
dream of happiness.” 

“But did he know himself?” 

“No; as it turns out, he did not. But I passed several years 
under the impression that he did, and that he refused to acknowl- 
edge the connection.” 

It was her turn, then, to listen, and his to speak. All that needed 
explanation he explained, and blamed himself for his passive acqui- 
escence in a wrongful state of things. 

“ I should have sought the poor fellow out myself in the first in- 
stance, and — ” 

He broke off. The door had opened softly, and Nurse Lois was 
standing on the threshold, with admonitory finger raised at Pearl. 

“Five minutes more !” the patient pleaded, earnestly, and Pearl’s 
moistened eyes seemed to put the same request. 

Nurse Lois closed the door softly on the outside, and once again 
the two were alone, as if the world at that moment held no other 
human being. 

“ When you see him, Pearl — ” 

“Perhaps I may never see him. He may not wish to see me.” 

“ He is coming home that he may see you.” 

She started. It had not occurred to her that he could know so 
much as this. 

“ Did Lord Glendown tell you ?” she asked, with a suppressed 
eagerness that told its own story to the sad eyes fixed on hers. 

He signed a weak affirmative, and she saw that his powers of 
further endurance were all but exhausted. 

“ What would you have me do?” 

Never in her life had she spoken so meekly, or with such perfect 
singleness of purpose. 

“ Tell him what you have told me.” 

He breathed these words rather than spoke them, and his eyes 
wandered to the ring on her finger. 

“ Shall I give this back to you ? Do you wish me not to wear it?” 


374 


THE PRICE OF A PEARL 


“ Not as you wear it now, but keep it if you will. I give you 
back the pledge it stands for.” 

“ But I would have kept it, I would have kept it indeed. Why 
do you make me take it back ?” 

“ Because it was never really mine, and I can’t keep what doesn’t 
belong to me.” 

“May I not come and see you sometimes? I cannot bear to leave 
you like this. Mr. Lewis, do let me come, please.” 

The note of eager pleading in her voice nearly unmanned him. 

“ Some day,” he whispered, faintly, “ when you can bring him 
with you. I look to you, dear child, to make him understand why 
— I kept silence for so many years. I thought — he wished it.” 

She bent down, and pressed her lips to his forehead. He felt her 
hot tears, though he could not see them, and perhaps in that mo- 
ment he tasted the full bitterness of his sacrifice. But there are 
some who can only enter halt or maimed into life, and this man was 
one of them. It was as if he had torn his own heart out and 
thrown it from him, when he gave Pearl back her word that after- 
noon. 


CHAPTER XI 


A DAY OF JUDGMENT 

“The world is full of Judgment Days, and into every assembly that a man 
enters, in every action he attempts, he is gauged and stamped.” 

“ I say, Army tage, are we to be kept here all day ?” 

Lord Glendown was to be excused for his gentle impatience of 
what he evidently regarded as needless delay. He had drawn up 
his high mail - phaeton before the flowery porch of a quaint, ivy- 
covered cottage, and the chestnut cobs were waxing restless under 
their enforced inaction. It was not forty minutes since they had 
been driven out of the great courtyard of Tenterbury House, but one 
might have almost fancied one’s self in the heart of the country, so 
rustic and old-fashioned were the surroundings of this suburban re- 
treat where Mrs. Mandeville had taken up her temporary abode. 

There appeared, however, to be some difficulty in obtaining ad- 
mission, and the chestnut cobs had done a good deal of stamping, 
and had whisked their glossy tails frequently and wrathfully before 
Hector’s repeated knocks were tardily acknowledged. 

Even then the maid, who was clearly not accustomed to deal with 
visitors, appeared more than doubtful as to the advisability of allow- 
ing these two to enter, and shut the door in their faces with true 
British caution, pending a consultation with some unseen individual 
in the background. The delay was therefore quite long enough to 
justify Glendown’s remonstrance, in making which he doubtless act- 
ed as mouth-piece to his impatient steeds. 

“ I have sent up my card. The girl didn’t seem sure whether we 
were strictly respectable, in spite of your smart turnout, old fel- 
low.” 

“Then the woman is at home, is she?” 

“ I hope so, but if she isn’t I must wait.” 

“ You’ll want my aid, dear boy. You’re far too guileless to get 
the truth out of her on your own hook.” 

The maid reappeared at this moment, with a request that the 


376 


THE PRICE OF A PEARL 


gentleman would “ step up-stairs.” At a signal from his friend, 
Glendown handed the reins to an attendant “ tiger,” and descended 
from his lofty eminence on the coach-box. 

“ Is the other gentleman a doctor, too ?” the maid asked, with a 
doubtful glance at Bertie which tickled his keen sense of humor. 

“ I am a friend of Dr. Armytage,” he answered, placidly, and mo- 
tioned to the other to lead the way. 

No further objection was put forward. The two men made their 
way up a steep, narrow staircase, and were ushered, or more cor- 
rectly perhaps ushered themselves (for the maid declined to pre- 
cede them), into a long, low sitting-room, of which, as it appeared, 
Johnny Watson was the sole occupant. 

“ I say !” he ejaculated, looking in helpless dismay from one to 
the other. “ Why ! they said — I mean, I thought it was the doctor, 
don’t you know ?” 

“ I am a doctor,” replied Hector, with ready composure. “ You 
have my card, I think, in your hand.” 

Glendown said nothing, but his squint was eloquent, and seemed 
to ask, with somewhat stern significance, “ Is this the way you keep 
your promise ?” 

Johnny betook himself to a hasty inspection of “ the doctor’s ” card. 

“ But I say ! look here, you know,” addressing Hector with an air 
of aggrieved perplexity. “Are you the fellow we sent for?” 

“ I don’t know whom you may have sent for, but I am a doctor, 
as you see, and known to Mrs. Mandeville. These are her rooms, I 
believe ?” 

Johnny’s stare was expressive of hopeless bewilderment. 

“But where have I seen you? Haven’t you been at our house? 
Wasn’t your name — ” 

“ My name is Armytage.” Very coldly and incisively spoken. 

“ M.D., M.R.C.S., and L.R.C.P.,” added Bertie, in a glib paren- 
thesis, which caused the Honorable John to ask, pettishly : 

“ What the dickens do you mean ?” 

“ Simply that my friend’s credentials are above suspicion, and that 
Dr. Armytage is not a charlatan ?” 

“Oh, of course, if he is a friend of yours,” muttered Johnny, 
sheepishly enough, “ that’s another matter. And you say you know 
Mrs. Mandeville ?” addressing himself again to Hector, this time with 
several added shades of ordinary politeness in his manner. 

The young doctor did not, however; relax from the attitude of 
professional stiffness which he had assumed when first challenged. 


A DAY OF JUDGMENT 377 

*‘1 have attended Mrs. Mandeville on board the Archangel ,” he 
answered, frigidly. 

“ Well, look here, I wish you’d see her now, Dr. Mac — ” 

“ Armytage,” repeated Hector, while the flash of his friend’s eyes 
warned Johnny that he had better be careful. 

“ I beg your pardon, Dr. Armytage. I meant to say — I wish you 
would go up and see her. They are all at sixes and sevens up there. 
I’m sure I don’t know what to do !” 

“ Is it your business, Johnny,” asked Glendown, rather pointedly, 
“ to do anything?” 

“ Well, but look here, you know, she was at a fancy-ball last 
night, and she wasn’t well then. Every one was talking about her, 
and so, of course, I came round to inquire. She wouldn’t send for 
the doctor this morning, and I don’t know anything about the fel- 
low they’ve gone to look for now.” 

“ I understood you to say you had sent for a doctor.” 

“ Yes ; but he hasn’t come, don’t you know. I say, I wish you’d 
go up to her.” 

Johnny was evidently uneasy, and glanced appealingly by turns 
at both his hostess’s visitors. 

“Would Mrs. Mandeville wish to see me?” asked Hector, turning 
a blind eye for once to the dissuasive glances of his friend. 

“ I don’t believe she’ll know you from Adam. They said she was 
delirious just now.” 

“ I had better go up, in that case !” exclaimed Hector, with the 
quick professional zeal that rises to emergency. 

Bertie began a hurried remonstrance, and drew him aside in ill- 
concealed dismay. 

“For Heaven’s sake, Hec, don’t go near her! She may have 
something catching, and then good-bye to your chance of — ” 

“ A doctor must be ready to run any risk of that sort, old fellow. 
Besides, you know what to say — if I am prevented from telling my 
own story. Don’t keep me, there’s a good chap. I feel I ought to 
go, unless — ” 

He broke off, for the maid came in at that moment with the un- 
welcome news that the doctor first sent for was not to be found, nor 
likely to be home before nightfall. 

“ There ! you see — I have no choice in the matter. You’ll wait 
for me, won’t yon ? I don’t suppose I shall be long.” 

“ Of course I’ll wait,” replied Bertie, gloomily. 

He was conscious of a chill feeling of dismay, which refused to be 


378 


THE PRICE OF A PEARL 


either calmly reasoned with or boldly subdued. Something told him 
that disaster was at hand, and his first impulse was to turn and rend 
the wretched Johnny as soon as Hector’s exit left them tete-a-t6te. 

“ This is a nice business,” he said, savagely ; “ and you’re a nice 
fellow, Watson ! What did you swear to me on your solemn honor 
last March at Monte Carlo?” 

“ I say ! look here, you know, I wanted to speak to you, Glen- 
down, about that business. You were all wrong, you know, about 
her. She explained the whole thing to me, and — ” 

“And you believed her, I suppose?” with a glance of withering 
scorn at Johnny’s asinine credulity. 

“ Well, what could a fellow do when she swore positively that 
she—” 

“ I don’t care to hear how she perjured herself. Neither does it 
matter to me two straws how you and she may choose to miscon- 
duct yourselves; but I object to my friend being mixed up with 
your very shady proceedings.” 

“Then what do you bring him here for?” said Johnny, with the 
sulkiness so curiously suggestive, in his case, of an exasperated and 
mutinous worm. 

“ I’ll tell you precisely, sir, what I brought him here for, if you 
wish to know — to confront her with her own falsehood about him. 
She has been guilty of the foulest treachery that ever a woman 
planned and tried to carry out, and I’m here to bring it home to 
her.” 

There was an intonation of terrific wrath in Glendown’s low, 
distinct utterance that ordinary passion would have been powerless 
to convey, and Johnny shivered in conscience-stricken terror. 

“ Don’t see how I’m to blame, anyhow,” he murmured, uneasily. 
“ I didn’t even know that she and MacAdam — er — the doctor, I 
mean — Oh, here you are !” 

The doctor’s youthful countenance looked exceedingly sober. 

“ This is a case of scarlet-fever,” he began, gravely. “ Do you 
happen to know — ” 

“ Oh, the devil !” ejaculated Johnny, with eyes starting and jaw 
dropping. “ That’s catching, isn’t it ?” 

“ It is highly infectious. Do you happen to know if Mrs. Mande- 
ville has been in the way of — ” 

Again Johnny cut him short with an agonized question. 

“ Do you suppose a fellow would have run any risk by dancing 
with her last night? She was awfully seedy, you know — didn’t 


A DAY OF JUDGMENT 


379 


look like herself one little bit ; and now I come to think of it, she 
said her throat was bad. O Lord! what shall I do? And I’ve 
been here over an hour.” 

“ It was rather a pity, Johnny, under the circumstances, that you 
didn’t keep your promise to me,” interposed Glendown, with cutting 
emphasis, before his friend could make any answer. 

“I say, it’s no joke!” retorted the miserable cur, who by this 
time was nearly crying. “ She may have had the rash out last night 
when I was dancing with her.” 

“ She probably had,” remarked Hector, very dryly ; “ but she has 
thrown it in now, and I for one would rather not answer for the 
consequences.” 

“ Well, look here, you know, I think I’d better go,” said Johnny, 
searching about feebly for his hat. “ I don’t see what a fellow can 
do in cases of this sort.” 

“ Has Mrs. Mandeville any friends at hand ?” asked the young 
doctor, with an unmistakable gesture of contemptuous disgust at 
Johnny’s abject cowardice. 

“ I fear only of Watson’s stamp.” 

Glendown’s drawl and curl of the lip were alike expressive, and for 
the second time that afternoon the worm turned in futile resentment. 

“ I don’t see what you expect me to do, either of you. Of course, 
I’ll take care that she’s properly looked after, and if you like to 
undertake the case — ” 

“ Pardon me,” interrupted Hector. “ I fancy that’s not a ques- 
tion for you to decide, Mr. Watson.” 

“ What the devil do you mean, sir ?” blustered Johnny ; but he 
was not suffered to complete his sentence. 

By dint of a little gentle pressure from Lord Glendown’s long, 
bony fingers he found himself the next moment thrust out of the 
room with this parting admonition, uttered in a tone of indolent 
good-nature : 

“ You’re on such intimate terms with the devil, Johnny, I’m sure 
you won’t mind going to him on the present occasion. At all 
events, we don’t want you here. And perhaps you will be so very 
kind as not to recognize either of us in future.” 

Some hours later Pearl was greatly astonished to receive a visit 
from Lord Glendown, who made his appearance unannounced at the 
door of her big double drawing-room, and asked, in his tranquil, un- 
concerned way, if she had ever had scarlet-fever. 


380 


THE PRICE OF A PEARL 


“I think so. Yes, a long time ago. Why? Have you been in 
the way of it, Lord Glendown? You often are, are you not?” 

“Am I?” he replied, with an amused smile. “ I didn’t know it.” 

He closed the door quietly behind him, dropped into a chair close 
by, and with one of his lazily imperious gestures motioned to her to 
keep her distance. 

“ I have observed all precautions, left nothing undone that I ought 
to do, and done nothing that I ought not to have done. It is not 
often that one can read the confession upsidedown like that, is it, 
Miss Merry weather ?” 

“ Not very often.” 

Pearl’s tone was perplexed. She knew his eccentric lordship well 
enough to be sure that this lightness of speech indicated some heavi- 
ness of heart ; and her woman’s wit could hardly fail to connect both 
with one whose name, if not yet mentioned, was uppermost in his 
thoughts as well as hers. 

Had he been disappointed in his friend, that he should look at her 
so strangely and sigh so heavily, and talk so much at random ? 

He seemed in no haste at first to explain himself. 

“ Mrs. Fursden has gone to bed, I suppose ? I am later than I 
meant to be, but you won’t turn me out, will you?” 

“Not just yet, certainly. Aunt Emily always goes to bed early.” 

“ And your father ? Is he gone to bed also ?” 

“ He is at Fingall. You know the bishop is dying.” 

“ I didn’t know. I haven’t looked at a paper these last two days.” 

There was another heavy sigh, another prolonged gaze at Pearl 
across the room’s length that divided them, and then she asked, 
nervously : 

“ You have been away, haven’t you ?” 

“ I have been away. How did you know that, Miss Merry weather?” 

“ I didn’t know. I — I only thought perhaps you were, as I hadn’t 
seen you.” 

“ Yes, I’ve been away. I hadn’t meant to have come by myself 
this evening.” 

Pause for a few breathless moments before she answered, with an 
air of cold constraint : 

“ I never expected any one to come with you.” 

“ I think you did,” with a quiet assurance that almost stupefied 
her. “ It is rude, I know, to contradict a lady, but I think you did 
expect some one besides me this evening. He meant, I know, to 
come, and I can’t believe you would have refused to see him.” 


A DAY OF JUDGMENT 


381 


“ It will Be time enough, perhaps, to settle that question, Lord 
Glendown, when your friend does come.’’ 

Her voice was almost as level as his own ; but, for all that, he was 
her master, and she knew it. Never yet had she measured swords 
with him without finding that his could pierce, while hers could only 
graze the surface. It was so now. She was trembling in every 
nerve, and he was simply smiling, though there was more of pathos 
than of humor in the curves of his half -mocking, half- sensitive 
mouth. 

“ Miss Merryweather, unfortunately for himself, if not for me, 
my friend can’t come for many days. I am here to tell you so, and 
to tell you why, if you will let me.” 

“ You are very goo.d,” said Pearl ; but the admission, if not ex- 
actly ungracious, was just a trifle stiff, and Bertie slightly shrugged 
his shoulders. “ I suppose,” she added, with increasing hauteur of 
manner — being nettled, doubtless, by this cavalier gesture — “ that, in 
plain English, your friend didn’t care to come, or perhaps he had 
some more pressing engagement. In either case, I don’t see why 
the matter should require such a solemn explanation.” 

Oh, foolish Pearl ! And all the while her heart was beating in 
her throat, a noise as of many waters was roaring in her ears, a 
rainbow-mist born of her own unshed, tears floated before her eyes, 
contradicting with irrefragable force her unadvised and captious 
speech. 

Bertie gave her a few moments in which to recover her composure 
before he answered, with the utmost sang-froid : 

“ Oh, well ! in that case I needn’t keep you up any longer. I had 
a sort of impression that you would have liked to hear the rights 
of that matter we discussed the other day ; but of course, if you have 
changed your mind, there is no more to be said.” 

She watched him with a sort of dazed air get up slowly from his 
seat. Was he going away, that he should take the handle of the 
door and turn it round, and — Good heavens ! had he wished her 
good-night, and shut the door after him, and gone away, or was she 
only dreaming? 

For a few moments more she sat on as if spellbound, and then a 
voice — Lewis’s voice — seemed to breathe faintly in her ear : 

“ Tell him what you have told me.” 

She sprang up as if she had been shot, rushed to the door, and 
opened it. 

“ Lord Glendown 1” 


382 


THE PRICE OF A PEARL 


Her voice went apparently into empty air, for there was no response 
to the low, appealing cry. 

Swiftly and noiselessly she hastened down the stairs. He turned 
just as he was leaving the inner hall, and saw her close beside him, 
her face almost as white as the lace that swathed her throat, her 
lips trembling, her form heaving. In that moment he knew, with a 
strange mixture of bliss and torture, that her pride was at last sub- 
dued. The last link of the chain was broken that bound her to her 
old life, to her old character. She had, in the words of the old Puri- 
tans, “ submitted unconditionally.” 

He said nothing, but followed her back quietly to the drawing- 
room. 

“You had something to tell me,” she said, with a meekness that 
makes a proud woman absolutely divine in the eyes of the man who 
loves her. 

But it seemed to be this man’s fate always to woo her — yes, and to 
subdue and win her — for another lover. 

“ You remember this ?” — laying the mysterious photograph before 
her which some unknown enemy had used as a poisoned arrow where- 
with to slay her feeble loyalty and her lingering faith. “You were 
quite right when you said there must be some one in the world who 
hated him and didn’t love you. It was Mrs. Mandeville who sent 
you this precious piece of foolery.” 

“ Mrs. Mandeville !” she repeated, wonderingly. 

“ My remembrance of her,” continued Bertie, leisurely, “ is that 
she never loved you much, Miss Merryweather. But I’m bound to 
say I wouldn’t have given even Mrs. Mandeville credit for this. It’s 
a black lie, though it is a photograph. That is not a woman at all 
that he is holding by the hands. It is a young fellow dressed up for 
some theatricals, to whom Armytage played the part of lover. I 
think, perhaps, if he had played it in good earnest to Mrs. Mande- 
ville that the photo would not have been sent to you. I foresaw some 
trouble with that woman when I knew that she was going to be a 
passenger on board the Archangel .” 

“ She — I remember that she liked him to talk to her,” murmured 
Pearl, almost inaudibly. 

Well indeed did she recall the pangs of fierce and unreasoning 
jealousy which “ that woman ” had awakened in her breast. 

“ You will wonder, perhaps, why he has not told you all this him- 
self. But, as I said just now, he can’t. Mrs. Mandeville is very ill, 
dangerously ill, I understand, with scarlet-fever, and Armytage is 


A DAY OF JUDGMENT 


383 


attending her. We drove down this afternoon, that he might have it 
out with her — mind, he only landed this morning — and, owing to 
some unfortunate blunder on the part of the maid who opened the 
door, he was let in for seeing her. Now you understand why he 
can’t come to you ; in fact, he would rather not write at present. 
But you can write to him, Miss Merry weather, if you will, and I 
can take the letter.” 

“ To-night?” 

“ The first thing to-morrow I drive down with one of the nurses 
from St. Basil’s. So, if you could write to-night — ” 

The letter was in his hands a few minutes later. 

“You will let me know,” she pleaded, with touching simplicity, 
“ how things go.” 

“ I will indeed. You may trust me, and you will pray for us 
both, Pearl — for her, too, if you can. This is a day of judgment.” 

She remembered the words afterwards, and knew that they had 
been prophetic. For in a day of judgment one is always taken, 
and the other left. 


CHAPTER XII 


FIAT VOLUNTAS 

“J’enfouis ce tresor dans mon ame immortelle, 

Et je l’emporte & Dieu.” 

“ One taken, and the other left.” 

To human judgment that choice seems strange and perplexing 
which spares the feeble or the worthless life, and removes one that 
is the centre of love and hope and pride — nay, more, a pivot on 
which may hang the destinies of “ generations that are yet unborn.” 
So it was now. The unexpected happened. The angel of death 
hovered for days about the neighborhood of that picturesque, ivy- 
covered cottage where it had been fated that the young physician 
should engage him in mortal combat. But the victim laid low at 
last was not Mrs. Mandeville. 

Pearl often wondered afterwards why she had had no misgiving, 
why no shadow of presentiment had crossed her mind the night that 
Bertie wished her good-bye, and asked her for her prayers, and said 
it was a day of judgment. 

The absence of such prevision makes the after-tragedy all the 
more heart-breaking. If she had known that she would never see 
him — but what would the knowledge have availed her? For the 
sort of love that he bore her there is no adequate return. The debt 
must be paid elsewhere. No earthly acknowledgment can write it 
off the books that are to be opened in heaven. 

Before she had realized that there was danger, the verdict was no 
hope. For all the passionate prayers of those who loved him, for 
all the doctors’ skill and Hector’s devoted nursing, his life seemed 
to slip away like sand between tight-clinched fingers. 

“ I don’t feel very bad,” he said once, when they knew he was dy- 
ing. “This is a light case, isn’t it?” 

Alas, yes! but not the less fatal for that, though no one dared to 
tell him so. It may have been that he read the truth in Hector’s bx- 
pressive face, for his own changed visibly. 


FIAT VOLUNTAS 


385 


“ Don’t fret yourself, dear boy,” he whispered, faintly. “ I think 
I’m rather glad.” 

“ Oh, Bertie, don’t — I shall never forgive myself for letting you 
come.” 

“You didn’t let me. I wanted — to set you right with her." 

A pause, in which the heavy eyelids fell and the blue lips moved 
silently, and Hector fanned him with a sinking heart. 

So fast were the sands running out, so swiftly was the tide ebb- 
ing, that they feared his mother would not be in time to see her last 
remaining child alive. 

No one had liked to tell him she was coming, fearful lest the 
news should startle him into the consciousness of his own mortal 
peril. 

But men die much as they live, and this man had never set a su- 
premely high value on his own existence. There was even a touch 
of sad mirth in his eyes when he again opened them, a gleam of the 
old drollery that had always colored his aspect of a life which, none 
the less, he was more than willing to have done with. 

“How is your other patient, Hec?” 

“ I don’t know,” groaned Hector, “ and I don’t care. I haven’t 
been near her since you sickened. The other fellow can look after 
her now 7 .” 

“I bear her no grudge,” said Bertie, with a feeble smile. “You 
can tell her so if she ever cares to know. Besides — it was my own 
lookout.” 

The night was over. The golden sunlight was invading the 
shadows on the dewy fields outside. A gentle breeze stirred the 
white curtains, and the nurse noiselessly drew them aside. Little by 
little the world awoke to the new day. A fair world it looked from 
that death-bed to such as had eyes to see it. And there have been 
men before now — good men, too, with well-spent lives behind them 
— who, at sight of the beautiful earth that they were called on to 
leave, have wrung their hands in bitter anguish. 

But to Bertie it had never been a world to live in, only a strange 
show of puppets, a motley scene of grotesque by-play and absurd 
solemnity and heavy-hearted jesting, a dissolving view in which there 
may be some beauty and must be much sorrow. They who look at 
it thus do not wring their hands when the bell sounds and the cur- 
tain comes down. 

Over and over again during that last hour of his life his lips were 
seen to move as if he was praying. But when he opened them he 
25 


386 


THE PRICE OF A PEARL 


said nothing* of his hopes or beliefs, even to the friend for whose 
sake he had foregone all that a man most covets of earthly happiness. 
His thoughts seemed still absorbed, as they had always been, with 
the needs and trials of others. 

“ Poor Bat Lewis !” he said, almost with his last breath. “ You’ll 
look after him, won’t you ? I promised that you would.” 

Hector nodded silently. 

“ It was all my fault, you know, that — Why, mother!” 

He broke off with a smile of glad surprise. They looked at each 
other in awed amazement, for his mother was not there — could not 
be there for another hour. 

It was not with the eyes of the body that he beheld her. A 
moment more, and these had looked their last on the daylight. 
The lonely yearning spirit was delivered from its irksome fleshly 
tenement. There was no heir now to the ancient house of Tenter- 
bury. 

“ Somehow I don’t think he was ever meant to stay long in this 
world. He never could have been very happy in it. For all his 
fun and oddity, I know he never really was happy.” 

Hector said this to Pearl weeks later, when they met at last, and 
clasped hands over an abyss of long and dreary years. 

There was an awed solemnity, a certain hallowed self-restraint 
about their greeting which augured well perhaps for their future 
blessedness. For the memory of the dead was with each of them, 
not as a chilling shade, but as a tender influence, and each felt sadly 
that the loss of his friendship was an abiding one which no after- 
happiness could ever wholly annul. 

“ Why do you think,” Pearl asked, rather wistfully, “ that he 
would never have been very happy ?” 

Perhaps she knew better than he did why his friend had not 
found overmuch sweetness in this tantalizing Barmecide’s feast 
which most of us call life, and yet cling to. 

“Because — well— there were several reasons, I think. For one 
thing, his own looks were a misery to him always. He was per- 
suaded that no woman could ever bring herself to care for him 
for his own sake. And yet he knew his people were very anxious 
for him to marry. He spoke of that as a man might speak of 
going to the gallows. I think, perhaps, he was almost morbid 
about women.” 

About one woman he might perhaps have been hypersensitive, but 


FIAT VOLUNTAS 


387 


that surely was her fault more than his. She sat still in remorseful 
silence, and every slighting look or word or thought which she had 
ever had concerning him came back to her now to reproach her for 
her want of insight. 

How she had learned to lean of late upon his friendship, and to 
expect his sympathy! And when had either ever failed her? Yet 
who had ever known her weakness so well, or spoken to her such 
true heart-searching words of deserved blame and righteous anger? 
And he had taken his secret with him to the grave. The friend 
whose interests he had served so loyally knew nothing of his hope- 
less, futile passion. Some weight seemed laid upon her lips when 
she would have spoken, bidding her respect his tender reticence, 
and spare the man to whose love she could respond any needless un- 
happiness. 

They talked of many things that brilliant autumn afternoon which 
witnessed their reunion — or, rather, he talked, and she listened. 

She knew fully for the first time all that Bertie had been to him 
when his father’s death threw him poor and nameless on the mercy 
of a cold, indifferent world. 

“You know he lent me money. I would not have taken it from 
any one else, but somehow he was different from other people; he 
had a way of making you feel that you were doing him a favor by 
letting: him help you. I paid him back the money, but I never got 
out of his debt.” 

The young man bit his lip, and turned away with filling eyes and 
working face. 

“ You don’t know what he was, Pearl. But for him I should never 
be here now. You would have been lost to me long ago.” 

“ And you to me,” she murmured, tearfully, with a fresh pang of 
self-reproach as she remembered that last interview in this very room 
between herself and Bertie. 

One moment more of foolish pride and misplaced reserve on that 
occasion, and she would indeed have “plucked down her house 
with her own hands,” and marred her own life beyond human re- 
demption. 

“ Pearl, is it true that you really have cared for me all these years? 
He told me that you did. He vowed that you had never forgotten 
the old days.” 

“ He knew that I tried hard to forget them,” she answered, in a 
contrite whisper. 

“Yes, yes, I know. But that was a mistake. You had taken up 


388 


THE PRICE OF A PEARL 


a wrong idea about me. He told me all that, Pearl, and he begged 
me to be quite frank with you.” 

Pearl held her peace. He might have given that order to his 
friend , but on her she still felt that he had enjoined silence. 

“ I will be frank with you,” continued Hector, with a little of his 
old boyishness as betrayed by his deepening color. “ I have been 
frank with her. You know we were friends?” 

“ I am afraid,” replied Pearl, rather sadly, “ that you are not friends 
now, and it is my fault.” 

“ It is no one’s fault,” the young man answered steadily, looking 
straight in her face as he spoke. “ I would have married her, I 
know, or at least I would have asked her to marry me, if I had not 
seen your face that night. That showed me my mistake; for it 
would have been a mistake. I liked her awfully, I do like her just 
as much as ever; but I knew when I saw you that I could never love 
her, and I went away without saying what I intended. Now you 
know the whole. I wish you had known it earlier.” 

“ Are you sure that you know the whole about me ?” she asked, 
still sadly, and holding herself aloof when he would fain have drawn 
her towards him. 

“ I know, of course, that you were to have married Mr. Lewis. That 
is what you meant just now when you said you had tried to forget 
the old days.” 

“ I meant that, but I meant more besides ; for it was not only 
that I felt sore about you, but I treated him so badly. Lord Glendown 
could have told you that if he would. He knew that, if that marriage 
had been carried out, I should have sold myself to the devil. And I 
knew I was doing it. That is the worst of it. Oh, sometimes I 
wonder how I can ever dare to be happy again for a moment. I have 
been so miserably weak and so wickedly proud.” 

“ Pearl, listen to me, my dearest. Do not hide your face. I have 
seen Mr. Lewis. I was with him before I came to you. And he 
doesn’t say of you what you say of yourself.” 

“ Because he doesn’t know of me what I know of myself,” sighed 
Pearl. 

“ He told me that you would have gone on with it — that you would 
have married him in spite of everything, and he said he knew that I 
wouldn’t prize your love the less for that offer to him, but more.” 

“What else did he tell you?” she asked him, humbly. It was 
her punishment always that these two men, though so unlike in all 
other ways, were alike in this : neither would believe any evil of her. 


FIAT VOLUNTAS 


380 


“He told me of his wife and of my mother. He was awfully 
kind, Pearl. Whoever else may stand between us and our happi- 
ness, he never will now.” 

“ I don’t deserve happiness,” she murmured, and still her face was 
hidden from him. 

“.Bertie would say that none of us do, but I know he wanted you 
and me to be happy,” pleaded Hector. 

She was silent; but there was something in her attitude which 
showed that the wistful simplicity of these last words had appealed 
to her tenderest feelings. Her lover saw it, and with gentle force 
compelled her to look up and meet his eyes. 

“Do you remember what I called you the day we parted? You 
called me Hector. What did I call you?” 

Very softly the word fell from her lips: 

“Andromache.” 

“Yes, Andromache. And then — I left you with Bertie. You 
remember ?” 

Her glistening eyes told him that she did. 

“ Well, now, somehow — I can’t help feeling that Bertie has left 
you with me. Am I wrong, dearest? I know he loved you for my 
sake. But I think it would have been strange if he hadn’t loved you 
for your own.” 

Her heart gave a glad leap of gratitude. There was to be no 
reserve between them, after all. Neither the dead nor the living 
should divide them from henceforth, if only she was honest now. 

“ I won’t have you love me on false pretences,” she said, bravely, 
though her trembling lips betrayed her agitation. “ Long ago, before 
you ever came to Fingall, I was very cruel to him. I did my best to 
make him love me. I don’t think he wanted to at all. But I wouldn’t 
rest till he did, and then — ” 

“You sent him empty away?” 

“Yes, I did ; and do you know how he punished me? He never 
reproached me, but he made me reproach myself bitterly. And then 
you came, and I was afraid, oh ! mortally afraid, that he would set 
you against me, and turn your heart away from me. He might have 
done it so easily.” 

“He never did.” 

“No, I know he never did. That was his punishment. Now you 
know the truth.” 

“He left you with me, Pearl, and, please God, we shall not be 
parted any more.” 


THE END 



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country life. No one has dealt with this kind of life better than Miss 
Wilkins. Nowhere are there to be found such faithful, delicately drawn, 
sympathetic, tenderly humorous pictures. — N. Y. Tribune. 

The charm of Miss Wilkins’s stories is in her intimate acquaintance and 
comprehension of humble life, and the sweet human interest she feels and 
makes her readers partake of, in the simple, common, homely people she 
draws. — Springfield Republican. 

The author has given us studies from real life which must be the result 
of a lifetime of patient, sympathetic observation. . . . No one has done 
the same kind of work so lovingly and so well. — Christian Register', 
Boston. 


Published by HARPER & BROTHERS, New York. 

SfiT The above works are for sale by all booksellers , or will be sent by mail , postage pre 
paid, to any part of the United States , Canada, or Mexico, on receipt of the price. 


STANDARD NOVELS IN PAPER COVERS. 


CHARLES DICKENS, pb ,ck 

Oliver Twist (illustrated) 8vo$0 50 

Martin Chuzzlewit (ill’d) 8vo 1 00 

Old Curiosity Shop (ill’d) 8vo 75 

David Copperfield (ill’d) 8vo 1 00 

.Dombey and Son (ill’d)' 8vo 1 00 

Nicholas Nickleby (ill’d). 8vo 1 00 

Bleak House (illustrated) 8vo 1 00 

Pickwick Papers (illustrated).. 8vo 1 00 

„ . , ^ 4 to 20 

Little Dorrit (illustrated) 8vo 1 00 

Barnaby Rudge (illustrated). . ,8vo 1 00 

A Tale of Two Cities (ill’d) 8vo 1 00 

Our Mutual Friend (ill’d) 8vo 1 00 

Christinas Stories (ill’d) 8vo 1 00 

Great Expectations (ill’d) 8vo 1 00 

The Uncommercial Traveller, Hard 
Times, and Edwin Drood (il- 
lustrated) 8vo 1 00 

Pictures from Italy, Sketches by 
Boz, and American Notes (il- 
lustrated) 8vo 1 00 

The Mudfog Papers 4to 

Hard Times 8vo 

Mrs. Lirriper’s Legacy 8vo 

EDWARD BULWEB. 

A Strange Story (illustrated). .8vo 

Devereux 8vo 

Godolphin 8vo 

Kenelm Chillingly 8vo 

Leila 8vo 

Night and Morning 8vo 

Pausanias the Spartan 8vo 

The Coming Race 12mo 

The Last Days of Pompeii 8vo 

The Parisians (illustrated) 8vo 

Zanoni 8vo 

WILKIE COLLINS. 

Armadale (illustrated) 8vo 

Antonina 8vo 

“I Say No ” 16mo 


My Lady’s Money 32mo 

No Name (ill’d by M’Lenan). . ,8vo 

Percy and the Prophet 32rno 

Poor Miss Finch (illustrated). .8vo 

The Evil Genius 12mo 

The Ghost’s Touch 12mo 

The Guilty River 12mo 

The Law and the Lady (ill’d).. 8 vo 
The Two Destinies (ill’d) 8vo 

R. D. BLACKMORE. 

Christowell. . . 4to 

Cradock Nowell 8vo 

Erema 8vo 

Kit and Kitty 8vo 

Lorna Doone (illustrated) 8vo 

Mary Anerley 4to 

Springhaven (illustrated) 4to 

Tommy Upmore 16mo 


VICTOR HUGO. 

Ninety-Three 8vo 

Toilers of the Sea 8vo 



1 00 


10 


25 

. .8 vo 

10 

:b. 

). .8vo 

50 


40 


35 


50 


25 


50 


25 

. 12mo 

50 


25 


60 


35 

S. 


60 


40 

,16mo 

35 

4to 

20 

,32mo 

25 

. .8vo 

60 

32 mo 

20 

i. .8vo 

60 

.12mo 

25 

. 12mo 

25 

,12mo 

25 

..8vo 

50 


35 

E. 


20 


60 


50 


35 


40 


15 


25 

,16mo 

35 

4to 

20 


25 


50 


CHARLES READE. PRICK 

A Perilous Secret 12mo $0 40 

Singleheart and Doubleface, &c. 

(illustrated) 4to 15 

A Hero and a Martyr 8vo 15 

A Simpleton 8vo 35 

A Woman-Hater (illustrated). .8vo 30 

12mo 25 

Good Stories (illustrated) 12mo 50 

“ 4to 20 

Foul Play 8vo 30 

White Lies 8vo 30 

Peg Woffington, and Other Tales 

8vo 35 

The Jilt (illustrated) 32mo 20 

The Coming Man 32mo 20 

The Picture .16mo 15 

Jack of All Trades . . l6mo 15 

GEORGE ELIOT. 

Felix Holt 8vo 50 

Middlemarch 8vo 75 

Dan i el Deronda 8vo 50 

Rornola (illustrated) 8vo 60 

Scenes of Clerical Life 8vo 50 

Silas Marner 12mo 25 

Adam Bede 4to 25 

Amos Barton 32mo 20 

Mr. Gilfll’s Love Story 32mo 20 

Janet's Repentance 32mo 20 

Brother Jacob The Lifted Veil 

32mo 20 

WILLIAM BLACK. 

A Daughter of Heth 8vo 35 

An Adventure in Thule 4to 10 

Donald Ross of Heimra 8vo 50 

Green Pastures and Piccadilly. 8vo 50 

In Far Lochaber 8vo 40 

In Silk Attire 8vo 35 

Judith Shakespeare 4to 20 

Kilmeny 8vo 35 

Macleod of Dare (ill’d) .4to, 15 , 8vo 60 

Madcap Violet 8vo 50 

Monarch of Mincing Lane (illus- 
trated) 8vo 50 

Prince Fortunatus (illustrated) 8vo 50 

Sabina Zembra 4to 20 

Stand Fast, C’raig-Royston (illus- 
trated).. 8vo 50 

Strange Adv’s of a Phaeton 8vo 50 

Strange Adventures of a House- 

Boat (illustrated) 8vo 50 

Sunrise 4to 20 

The Maid of Killeena, &c 8vo 40 

Three Feathers (illustrated). . .8vo 50 
White Wings 4to 20 

H. RIDER HAGGARD. 

She (illustrated) lGmo 25 

King Solomon’s Mines 4to 20 

Jess 4to 15 

Allan Quatermain (ill’d) 16mo 25 

Mr. Meeson’s Will 16mo 25 

Maiwa’s Revenge (ill’d) 16mo 25 

Col. Quaritch,V.C. (ill’d) 16mo 25 

Cleopatra (illustrated) 16mo 25 

Beatrice (illustrated) 16mo 30 

The World’s Desire 16mo 35 

Eric Brighteyes 16mo 25 


WILLIAM M. THACKERAY. PRICE 

Henry Esmond 4to$0 20 

Denis Duval (illustrated) 8vo 25 

Great Hoggarty Diamond 8vo 20 

Vanity Fair (illustrated) 8vo 80 

Pendennis (illustrated) 8vo 75 

The Virginians (illustrated).. . .8vo 90 
The Newcomes (illustrated) 8vo 90 

WALTER BESANT. 

Uncle Jack and Other Stories. 12mo 25 

All in a Garden Fair 4to 20 

Self or Bearer 4to 15 

For Faith and Freedom 8vo 50 

The Bell of St. Paul’s 8vo 35 

The Inner House 8vo 30 

The World Went Very Well Then 

(illustrated) 4to 25 

The Children of Gibeon 8vo 50 

The Holy Rose 4to 20 

Katherine Regina 4to 15 

Dorothy Forster 4to 20 

To Call Her Mine (illustrated). .4to 20 

Herr Paulus 8vo 35 

Armorel of Lyonesse (ill’d) 8vo 50 

All Sorts and Conditions of Men 

(illustrated) 8vo 50 

St. Katherine’s by the Tower (illus- 
trated) 8vo 60 

BESANT & RICE. 

Golden Butterfly 8vo 40 

When the Ship Comes Home.32mo 25 

’Twas in Trafalgar's Bay 32mo 20 

Sweet Nelly 4to 10 

Shepherds All and Maidens Fair. 

32 mo 25 

The Chaplain of the Fleet 4to 20 

By Celia’s Arbor (illustrated). .8vo 50 
The Captain’s Room 4to 10 

W. CLARK RUSSELL. 

Auld Lang Syne 4to 10 

A Sailor’s Sweetheart 4to 15 

A Sea Queen 4to 20 

A Strange Voyage 4to 20 

A Book for the Hammock 4to 20 

Wreck of the ; ‘Grosvenor ” .. ,4to 15 

An Ocean Tragedy 8vo 50 

The“ Lady Maud ’’(illustrated). 4to 20 

Marooned 8vo 25 

My Danish Sweetheart (ill’d).. 8vo 60 

My Shipmate Louise 8vo 50 

In the Middle Watch 12mo 25 

Little Loo 4to 20 

On the Fo’k’sle Head 4to 15 

Voyage to the Cape 12mo 25 

Round the Galley Fire 4to 15 

The Golden Hope 4to 20 

The Frozen Pirate (illustrated) ,4to 25 
Mrs. Dines’s Jewels(illustrated).8vo 50 

THOMAS HARDY. 

A Group of Noble Dames (illus- 
trated) 8vo 75 

The Woodlanders .4to 20 

Fellow-Townsmen 32mo 20 

A Laodicean (illustrated) 4to 20 

Wessex Tales 8vo 30 


Published by HARPER & BROTHERS, New \ ork. 

13 T Any of the ab<fve works sent by mail, postage prepaid , to any part of the United States, Canada, or Mexico, 

on receipt of the price. 



The Best for Family Reading. 

N O publishing house has yet succeeded in ministering, as the Harpers do, through their period- 
icals, to old and young, men and women seekers for current news graphically illustrated, 
scholars, travellers, and artists, and children of all ages. — Observer, N. Y. 

Its history is a large part of the literary 
history of the nineteenth century i?i America. 
— N. Y. Journal of Commerce. 

The only illustrated paper of the day that , 
in its essential characteristics , is recognized 
as a national paper . — Brooklyn Eagle. 

To take it is a matter of economy. No 
one ca?i afford to be without it . — Chicago 
Evening Journal. 

Harper’s Young People contains a 
marvellous amount of healthful and inter est- 
ing reading for young people of all ages and 
both sexes . — Boston Journal. 


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Published by HARPER & BROTHERS, New York. 


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